The Beatles 1st live US performance on CBS’s Ed Sullivan Show. The Beatles performed five songs and … [+] filmed pre-recording of an additional performance for the Ed Sullivan Show, 9th February 1964. Evaluation Scan Only – If you require a high resolution copy, please contact desk@mirrorpix.com (Photo by Daily Mirror/Mirrorpix/Mirrorpix via Getty Images)
Mirrorpix via Getty Images
It was largely business as usual in last week’s Nielsen Music Midyear Report. Streaming is up, traditional album sales are down, vinyl’s heroic resurgence persists, and CDs and digital albums continue their death march into obscurity. Oh, and BTS is still crushing it.
The Korean pop septet’s new album, Map of the Soul: 7, is the bestselling physical album of the year and the only one to sell over 500,000 copies in the United States, more than doubling the sales of runner-up Kenny Chesney. Map of the Soul: 7 is also the ninth-biggest overall album of the year, moving 842,000 equivalent units derived from album sales, track downloads and streams.
Additionally, BTS landed at No. 2 among all pop artists in terms of total consumption, right behind Billie Eilish. In total, the boy band has moved 1.417 million album-equivalent units through the first half of 2020. Only one other group has eclipsed 1 million album units in the U.S., and they’re a group to which BTS often gets compared: The Beatles.
Half a century after their breakup, The Beatles are still the biggest rock band of 2020, shifting 1.094 million album-equivalent units through the first six months of the year, 326,000 units ahead of the genre’s second-place finisher, Queen. The Fab Four also had the fifth-bestselling vinyl album of the year, selling 54,000 copies of their 1969 opus Abbey Road. They had good company in the vinyl category, including fellow classic rock icons Queen and Pink Floyd, pop supernova Billie Eilish and retro-rock heartthrob Harry Styles. The Beatles also perform exceptionally well on streaming services, with many songs racking up hundreds of millions of plays.
It’s fitting that the Beatles and BTS—two boy bands that dominated the music industry nearly six decades apart—would be the bestselling groups of 2020. Both groups enchanted waves of fans around the world with their talent and charisma, cultivating unique personas to stand out from their bandmates. Both groups continued to one-up themselves with a series of increasingly ambitious and successful albums. And based on Nielsen’s Midyear Report, neither group’s popularity shows any signs of waning.
READ MORE:
Like what you see? Follow me on Twitter for more.