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BTS. (provided by Big Hit Entertainment)

South Korea’s leading boy bands and girl groups are shaking up the global music industry. Fans around the world have been going wild over new songs released a week apart by two giants of K-pop, BTS and Blackpink. Amid high hopes for the two acts to drive a historic “twin success” for K-pop on the global stage, observers are focused on the new records they are poised to set.

“Dynamite,” the latest single released by BTS on Aug. 31, is already setting records. The song ushered in a new chapter in K-pop history on Sept. 1 when it hit the number one spot of the Billboard Hot 100 chart. BTS is the first South Korean act to top the chart. The previous best Hot 100 performance by a South Korean artist was number two, attained by PSY for seven straight weeks with his song “Gangnam Style.”

On Aug. 21, “Dynamite” also reached number one on the Global Top 50 chart by Spotify, the world’s largest music streaming service, in another first for a South Korean artist. On Aug. 29, the song debuted at number three on the Singles Chart in the UK’s Official Charts, one of the world’s major pop charts. With this performance, BTS bested its own previous record, having previously reached #13 on the UK Singles Chart in April with the song “Boy with Luv.”

The group is also racking up historic performances on YouTube. Released on the video-sharing platform, the music video for the new song became the fastest anywhere in the world to reach 100 million views, then 200 million. It hit 100 million views within 24 hours of its release and passed the 200 million-view mark within four days and 12 hours (108 hours total). The time taken to reach 200 million was fully a week shorter than the record the group had previously set with 11 days, 19 hours, and 42 minutes for “Boy with Luv.”

The strong performance by “Dynamite” has been also raising high hopes for its performance on Billboard's main chart. Some US media outlets had been predicting that it would reach the top spot on the Billboard chart. Citing the song’s performance on other charts, the economic biweekly Forbes noted on Aug. 27 that “Dynamite” had been “living up to its name in its first week of release” and was “expected to explode to No. 1 on next week’s Billboard Hot 100.”

BTS’ previous high on the Hot 100 was #4, which it reached with the February release “ON.” While the group had topped the Billboard 200 album chart four times in the past with albums such as its third full-length “Love Yourself: Tear” and its EP “Map of the Soul: Personal,” it had never before reached #1 on the Hot 100 singles chart. By topping the Hot 100, “Dynamite” has set a new record for South Korean pop.

Blackpink (provided by YG Entertainment)

Blackpink has also received a strong response. “Ice Cream,” a collaboration with the US pop singer Selena Gomez released on Aug. 28, hit number one the same day on the iTunes Worldwide Song Chart -- considered one of the world’s top three music charts. It also entered the Spotify Global Top 50 chart at #4. The group has been building popularity, with its new release coming two months after “How You Like That” in June.

On YouTube, the music video passed 100 million hits within 41 hours, becoming Blackpink’s 21st video to date to reach nine-figure views. It was the second fastest Blackpink music video to reach the 100 million mark, with “How You Like That” achieving the feat in 32 hours.

The strong performance by “Ice Cream” has not stopped there. On the day of its release, the number of subscribers for Blackpink’s official YouTube channel rose at a rate of 100,000 per hour, eventually passing 45.6 million by that evening. The total made it the third highest-ranking male or female act in terms of subscribers anywhere in the world, after Justin Bieber and DJ Marshmello. As of Aug. 31, the total numbers of YouTube channel subscribers stood at 56.3 million for Bieber, 48 million for Marshmello, and 45.6 million for Blackpink. BTS had 43.1 million.

The massive success of BTS and Blackpink in the global music market is being attributed to a carefully crafted global strategy rooted in strong respective fan bases. Popular culture critic Kim Yoon-ha noted, “The two acts’ new releases use predominantly English instead of Korean, while the music videos’ settings, costumes, and props recall US teen movies and TV shows.”

“You can see the evidence of efforts to target the global market,” she said.

Kim observed, “They’ve also chosen bright and light-hearted songs that contrast with their previous image for the new releases, and they’ve presented them either as special singles [‘Dynamite’] or as lead singles [‘Ice Cream’] rather than as title tracks for an official album release.”

“This is a way for them to experiment with new things while still maintaining the same flavor as before. Depending on how the songs perform, we could see them broadening the scope of their repertoire,” she predicted.

By Kim Kyung-wook, staff reporter

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