The album sales of Seventeen and aespa in this month will probably show where KPop is heading to.
Although some acts were able to hold on, generally KPop album sales declined by around 30-40%.
SVT sold about 2.9mil and aespa 1.15mil in their first weeks this year. If there are marked decline to these figures that means the decline of KPop is permanent and cannot really be reversed.
Out of all the singers who had concerts in the Olympic or Soccer Stadium, all but two, including Lim Youngwoong, had sales north of 1 million. One of the exceptions was Psy who had more than 1 Billion views.
Yet the Koreans allowed someone who neither sold 1 million albums nor had 1 billion views to have a concert larger than anyone else. Her 2024 concert is the largest concert ever held in Korea during the 2020s, and will remain so since Korea no longer has any stadium capable of housing more than 35,000 now.
I see it as shooting its own feet.
The singer, whose name I won't mention here, had a larger concert than everyone in this year who had more than a million album sales, basically showing the world that all these album sales might not show the real popularity of such acts, to put it mildly.
I think that more than anything , this
signified the beginning of the end of the album explosion of KPop.
It took quite some time for the reality to sink in, but if someone who never sold more than 400,000 albums in her entire career can have a larger concert than all these acts who sold more than a million copies, what were the fans doing by buying multiple copies of albums?
That was the beginning of a huge trend change. The singer who only had hostility against KPop might be getting her final revenge after all.
The general retreat of KPop from all across the board is turning into a rout, and at this rate on 2025 the highest selling act won't beat 2,000,000.
People like Day6 and Qwer do not clear huge numbers of albums.
What will happen to Kpop ? WIthout the huge sales the fervor cannot continue for too long. It was wrong to tolerate someone who regularly undermined KPop whenever she could, and that is going to hurt a lot.
