NEW YORK, NEW YORK – FEBRUARY 21: K-pop boy band BTS visit the SiriusXM Studios on February 21, 2020 … [+] in New York City. (Photo by Cindy Ord/Getty Images for SiriusXM)
Getty Images for SiriusXM
It’s now well into July (as difficult as that may be to believe), which means it’s time to begin looking at what songs and albums have been performing the best in the first six months of 2020. Nielsen Music NLSN has just released its annual mid-year report, which is full of lists of bestsellers and streaming giants, and the data included highlights what Americans can’t get enough of.
As has been the case for the past many years, album sales have fallen considerably, even from the same time last year. Total purchases of full-lengths dipped just over 18% year-over-year, with Americans opening their wallets to own just 45.5 million albums so far in 2020.
The list of the bestselling albums is a very healthy mix of pop, country, rock and even hip-hop, and there is one title that has been far more successful than all the others on the ranking.
BTS’s Map of the Soul: 7 has already sold 552,000 copies (between digital and physical formats), which puts it in a distant first place. The set leads by nearly 150,000 sales, as The Weeknd’s After Hours, which comes in second, has only managed to sell 407,000 copies.
Map of the Soul: 7 is the only title to sell at least half a million copies in 2020, and while that will surely change by the end of the year, it already looks like BTS will put up a fight for the bestselling release of 2020.
After debuting at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 this spring, Map of the Soul: 7 has steadily stepped down on the all-genre ranking, though it has consistently ranked among the bestselling titles in the country every week. In fact, the set just recently fell outside the top 10 on the Top Album Sales chart, which ranks the full-lengths that sell the most copies every frame.
The vast majority of Map of the Soul: 7’s sales are physical, which is shocking in today’s musical economy. A whopping 95% of all purchases of the South Korean septet’s latest have been on some physical format, while the rest were digital. Somewhat surprisingly, BTS’s latest leads the bestselling physical albums list as well, but it doesn’t even appear on the ranking of the bestselling digital albums in the U.S. this year.
In addition to being the bestselling album of 2020, Map of the Soul: 7 is also the ninth-most-consumed title of the year, taking into account purchases and streaming and track sale equivalent units.