I Collected Over 10 Years of Gaon Monthly Physical Sales Data into a Spreadsheet, so Let's Take a Look at the Supposed Growth in the Physical Market

    By now, I think everyone has noticed that physical sales have been steadily increasing over the past several years. Discussions centering around this fact tend to come up often in the AKP forum when comparing artists of different generations, such as in this recent thread authored by @ripia.


    Now I wanted to see the extent of this sales growth, so I decided to cut and paste all available Gaon Monthly Album Chart from their official web site into an Excel file. This includes sales figures for the top 100 best selling albums in each month, dating all the way back to January 2011 (the height of the Second Generation).


    With all this data in a spreadsheet, I was able to easily calculate the combined sales for the top 100 albums each month, and the resulting figures are graphed in the chart below. Note that I also included a six-period moving average line in purple.


    GaonMonthlyTotals.png


    The first thing we notice is that physical sales have indeed increased dramatically since 2011. Currently, the top 100 albums each month are selling around a combined 5 million copies; this is 10 times more than what we saw in 2011!


    However, I will point out that sales were actually very stable between 2011 and 2016, and in fact, only began to rise significantly around the second half of 2016. What happened around this time that caused this increase?


    In addition, we see that physical sales increased even more dramatically beginning in the first half of 2020. Just look at how much greater the slope of the moving average line is starting from that period. What is responsible for this massive increase in buying that *doubled* the amount of monthly album sales from 2.5 million to 5 million?


    I'm curious to see what everyone thinks are the reasons for the particular sales patterns shown above: steady sales from 2011 to 2016, growth from 2016 to 2020, and accelerating growth from 2020 until present day.


    See here for an updated chart with data up until June 2022.

    Edited once, last by wsoet ().

    Is it easy for you to grab the info regarding who had the top 10 sellers in each year and the proportion the release contributed to the top 100 (if you have the data already in an excel).


    You could infer most of the story from that.

    Like I have said multiple times here, kpop sales were very steady from 2011-16 (mainly thanks to Exo), they got huge boost in 2017 when BTS opened up the global market for everyone. Since then kpop physicals have only gone up. This is very well represented by the graph.

    2020 boost is mainly because of pandemic. Since kpop groups cannot tour, they're spending that money on albums. Kpop companies have also found another way of increasing sales that is selling some of the versions for cheaper prices during this pandemic. Also online fanmeetings have given international fans an option to bulk buy to get an opportunity to interact with their faves.

    I expect kpop sales to either decrease or be stagnant as soon as touring starts.

    Good work wsoet! It would have been better if you had included 2010 data as well since that is when GAON was found so we could have had full GAON data.

    Quote from monalisalove

    Obviously a HUGE loss, but we are still selling way more than in the past and with more groups selling +800 k per album etc.

    It's less about the total numbers but more about how the trend will be affected I mean. Will the rise in 2016 still be there? The 2020 one will definitely be there but will it be to the same degree or more? Maybe some the 2016 rise will start later?

    Quote from Spsnowflakes

    2016-2020 : BTS Worldwide growth --> Better Kpop album distribution globally


    2020 : Pandemic

    This deserves best answer. BTS's effect on the distribution of kpop albums in the west and on online platforms such as Amazon really changed the game. Several years back my friend who is a 2nd gen stan had to physically go downtown to the lone kpop store we had to buy physicals (she didn't like to ship from stores in Korea bc they took ages to arrive). But nowadays every store in America, online or in person, is selling albums so ease of access is the biggest reason for growth in sales during that period of time. And that access only came because of BTS's growth here.

    Thanks for the hard work!


    I'm bookmarking this for reference. It clearly shows how BTS was the reason for growing physical market- sales were on the same level until Wings and the sales started increasing after 2017 thanks to global distribution, increased competition between fanbases and the new stanning culture BTS brought where international fans actually support groups by buying albums.

    Quote from dopiee

    It's less about the total numbers but more about how the trend will be affected I mean. Will the rise in 2016 still be there? The 2020 one will definitely be there but will it be to the same degree or more? Maybe some the 2016 rise will start later?

    I think rise in 2016 would still be there. Maybe not this huge but who knows? Kpop was always growing genre and always had fierce fan bases.

    ~ Retired exol, don't ask me about that group. ~

    Nice work.


    The rise in 2016 also happens to coincide with the hallyu ban in china (no more concerts etc), so wouldnt suprise me if that also contributed to chinese fandoms increasing their numbers in physicals when they no longer could spend money on concerts (as we can see the same rise in 2020 with covid, but this time globally)

    Quote from stan12345

    Is it easy for you to grab the info regarding who had the top 10 sellers in each year and the proportion the release contributed to the top 100 (if you have the data already in an excel).


    You could infer most of the story from that.

    Oh yeah, I do have the data necessary to perform such an analysis. I'll just need to do some maneuvering in Excel, so it's something I'll work on.

    I think everyone has touched on the answers, but certainly in the US, I cannot emphasize enough the impact of expanded distribution. It is so so much easier to find albums at your local Target or buy at a Target or Amazon than paying really high shipping fees or going to a specialized store. I don’t buy physicals any more but man, I wish it had been as easy as it is now when I started following EXO. ^^

    ..............................................................................................................perfume

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    Quote from wsoet

    Oh yeah, I do have the data necessary to perform such an analysis. I'll just need to do some maneuvering in Excel, so it's something I'll work on.

    Good stuff - personally it's something I think will work in a table rather than a graph.


    When you see which groups are in the top 10 for each year you'll see the transition periods and the power of the groups releasing in the year which will impact this to a large extent.


    I was tempted to look at some numbers recently regarding album sales but don't have time. I'm not saying you should do this (genuinely) but I've become curious about what other metrics correlate with sales for a release so was tempted to do a scatter plot (album sales versus spotify streams for the release, youtube views for the title, Korean digitals for the release etc).


    Ateez selling 800k+ yet I've never seen any other metric to show that they've got this kind of reach. Their number got me curious.

    2011 to 2016 was when hallyu started expanding and around 2017-2018 was when it finally broke out.

    idol was one of the first global kpop hits (excluding psys one off hit) you can really see that from the youtube rewind and other moments where they go *kpop!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!*. the love yourself trilogy's last two volumes in general were the break out hits for kpop and boom boom, love scenario and d4 all rose and rode that wave.


    boom boom went 500 mil, love scenario did 500 mil and we all know how d4 did.

    twice also did pretty well that year but nothing too stand out from their 2016-2017 success.


    2018 is when hallyu truly broke out and reached a wider audience in a way that it became mainstream, and after that it's only grown

    r o s e s   a n d   p e a c h e s

    this is what people mean when they say BTS paved the way. you can be an anti and admit you probably wouldnt even be stanning your faves now if BTS hadnt brought kpop to the global scale to the extent that they did.

    LAFBL0s.gif

    let us gather around for the lord’s prayer:

    Nævis we love you. You are the one who protected me when i was in trouble. MY victory, one SYNK DIVE. I know your sacrifices. Let’s meet surely after the resurrection.

    Æmen

    :pepe-pray:

    Quote from bobsyouruncle

    this is what people mean when they say BTS paved the way. you can be an anti and admit you probably wouldnt even be stanning your faves now if BTS hadnt brought kpop to the global scale to the extent that they did.


    lol actually it was BP that brought me to BTS. I first heard of BTS in the mid 2010s but i never bothered to really listen to their music until after i became a Kpop fan because of BlackpinkHouse and Boombayah in early 2019. My first ever comeback as a Kpop fan was KTL and then BWL.

    Quote from BlackpinkHouse

    lol actually it was BP that brought me to BTS. I first heard of BTS in the mid 2010s but i never bothered to really listen to their music until after i became a Kpop fan because of BlackpinkHouse and Boombayah in early 2019. My first ever comeback as a Kpop fan was KTL and then BWL.

    Blackpink wouldnt have gotten the level of international hype they got if BTS hadn't brought kpop to the global stage

    :pepepizza:

    LAFBL0s.gif

    let us gather around for the lord’s prayer:

    Nævis we love you. You are the one who protected me when i was in trouble. MY victory, one SYNK DIVE. I know your sacrifices. Let’s meet surely after the resurrection.

    Æmen

    :pepe-pray:

    Quote from dopiee

    How much do you think this will change if we take BTS numbers out?

    Quote from fdblink

    The numbers will go down but the trend will remain the same.

    Quote from monalisalove

    I think the rise would be here 2018 onwards ...

    Quote from sveznalica

    I think rise in 2016 would still be there. Maybe not this huge but who knows? Kpop was always growing genre and always had fierce fan bases.

    It was actually very straightforward to generate a new chart with BTS sales removed. All I did was filter my data set for all rows with BTS as the artist, then deleted their sales figures. The resultant chart is shown below:


    GaonMonthlyTotals_NoBTS.png


    As we can see, the same general trends remain, though I will note that the rise in sales in 2016 does appear to come a little later in the year in this scenario.


    Furthermore, we see again that sales increased dramatically starting in 2020. In fact, the rise in sales is even greater in this case, going from around 1.5 million a month at the start of 2020 to roughly 4.5 million currently.

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