Ironically enough, BTS’ latest single “Dynamite” is exploding all previous records set by the band themselves, Korean acts, and the whole music industry.

On August 21st, the band released their first all-English summer track, “Dynamite.” The song started breaking records before it was even released, crushing the YouTube premiere record by having 3 million+ people waiting on the music video before it was released. 20 minutes later, another record was broken after the music video surpassed 10 million views, making it the fastest video to do so. Finally, 24 hours later BTS garnered 101.1 million views on the music video, making it the most-viewed YouTube video in 24 hours.

Come Monday, August 31st “Dynamite” ranked number one on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, becoming the group’s first track to reach this milestone; they are the first all-South Korean act to do so. According to Billboard, “Dynamite” sold 300,000 copies in its first week, 265,000 of these were digital downloads, making it the biggest Digital sales debut since “Look What You Made Me Do” in 2017. Adding onto this, in the songs second week it sold 182K copies, which is still larger than any other sales week for a single this year, and the largest in four years. This also put the song at #1 for a second week, the first for a band in a century.

More accomplishments from the song include:

• 228 Perfect-all-kills (and counting), the 2nd song in history to achieve this many. (Perfect-all-kill is the number of hours from 7:30AM-12:30AM the song was #1 on every Korean music platform.)
• 17 days (and counting) at #1 on worldwide iTunes, the most for any Korean group.
• #1 in 109 countries on iTunes, the fastest song to do so.
• 12 consecutive days at #1 on iTunes US, the longest for any Korean act.
• The biggest debut of 2020 on Spotify with 7,778,950 streams, despite Korea not having the service.
• #1 best selling download released in 2020 in the US, two weeks after release.

  

In an interview with Billboard, RM, who is the group leader, explained the motivating factor behind releasing the song,  “We made this song in hopes of giving energy to the listeners. We’re glad this song turned out great and hope a lot of our fans can listen to it to receive the positive energy we tried to incorporate in the song.” Despite all of the success of the song, BTS make it clear the song’s purpose wasn’t to break records but to bring comfort in difficult times.

BTS has three performances of “Dynamite” scheduled so far as well as a music video focused on the choreography, as seen in the official schedule below.

A new album by the group will be coming out in the last quarter of 2020, their second this year. Surely, we can expect just as much success as seen in Dynamite.