Dynamite and an ARMY: how K-pop’s BTS invaded the US billboard charts

RM, V, J-Hope, Jungkook, Suga, Jin and Jimin belong to no ordinary boy band, but a multibillion-dollar enterprise making up a chunk of South Korea’s GDP

While their success has only recently been recognised overseas, it has been a long-time coming and owes much to savvy marketing and fan engagement

Reading Time:4 minutes

South Korean boy band BTS perform at the 2020 MTV Video Music Awards. Photo: AFP

Published: 7:30pm, 8 Sep 2020Updated: 7:45pm, 8 Sep 2020

While K-pop outfit BTS’ first English-language single Dynamite continues to dominate the charts, the boy band’s management company Big Hit Entertainment is reportedly eyeing an IPO in October worth US$811 million.

The firm’s CEO Bang Si-hyuk is to offer his superstar group just over US$54 million in shares to strengthen their “long-term partnership” and “boost morale”, according to industry reports this week.

And that’s a boon not only for the personal fortunes of the band’s seven members – RM, V, J-Hope, Jungkook, Suga, Jin and Jimin. The group accounted for more than US$4.65 billion, or 0.3 per cent of their native South Korea’s GDP in 2019, according to the Hyundai Research Institute.

Yet for all the band’s success – and its immense global fan base called ARMY – it is only recently, and particularly since Dynamite debuted at No. 1 on the US billboard 100 chart in late August, that overseas critics and institutions have begun to sit up and take notice.

For K-pop fans and industry experts who’ve been watching the group’s monumental rise, the band’s tremendous global success is not down to chance. Rather, it has been in the making since the group’s 2013 debut and owes much to savvy marketing and fan engagement.

“The heart of BTS’s success is the talent and charisma of the members presented to global audiences through abundant and frequent online interactions between BTS and ARMY,” says CedarBough Saeji, a Korea scholar and visiting assistant professor at Indiana University, Bloomington. “ARMY has truly responded to the members and lifted them up – refusing to bow to gatekeepers and continually promoting the group in small and large ways.”