So I have just seen this thread and the post, and the other people giving applause this post.
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You kids will acknowledge the truth when the next it group surpasses BTS in every terms but let me explain this. The post says that TVXQ did well in physicals sales, Bigbang did well in digitals, so BTS is better than them because they do well in both.
1st of all in the past, Twitter, Youtube and other SNS platforms either didn't exist or wasn't popular. Those platforms (actually the fandoms who been using them) have created number-obsessed fans who try to organize and break record at any platform or in physical sales, streams, digitals. Additionally thanks to SNS, now everything is easy to achieve and people can get to know about everything.
Now let's go back in time. When TVXQ and Bigbang had their peak, neither buying physical albums were easy, nor accessing and downloading songs were easy.
*Online physical album sales were very rare. Fans used to get in line in music shops, so only Korean and Japanese fans could get the albums.
*Shipping worldwide was very rare (not only for Kpop cds but for everything around the world). You had to find someone to translate the page to purchase an album (if you were lucky to find a store that ships abroad and have money to pay a shipment fee which costed like x10 times more than the album and have patience to wait for a some months)
*Albums weren't fancy then. There were only a CD and an album cover, which means albums then were made for people to listen to the songs.
*Digital music services were still being established and were not completed.
*Digital music services were expensive. You had to pay too much for a song and the subscription.
*Digital music services weren't accessible from outside of Korea.
*(Illegal) MP3 downloading was widespread.
*S.Korea's economy was shit.
These are just a few of a lot of reasons why people had to make a choice between physicals and digitals, and why the numbers weren't high at all.
Let's focus on today.
*You can purchase any Kpop album online even from a store in your own country.
*Albums come with a lot of fancy things like random photo cards, album covers, poloraid photos of members, lottery tickets, posters, photobooks which makes fans buy many albums.
*You can access Korean music platforms from anywhere by using a VPN. Most of them don't even require a VPN.
*Digital music services are now cheap. You can buy a pack with 100 song download+unlimited streaming for like $8.
*Fan pages on Twitter give away thousands of download+streaming passes for those Digital music services everyday.
*S.Korea's economy is amazing thanks to their technologic development since the middle of 2010s.
The most important thing today that boosts Kpop artists' physical and digital stats is the competetion, and what creates the competition is SNS. Even Bang Shi Hyuk and RM said that the biggest role in their popularity belongs to SNS.
Now kids who were babies or too young then will claim that SNS existed at TVXQ and BB's peak but no. Even internet connection was limited then. Youtube was created in 2005 but it was just one of a thousands of video websites. It started becoming popular in around 2013-2014 after official music distributors made a deal with them. The same goes for Twitter where Kpop fans organize and boost up Kpop competetion, and manipulate the charts.
Now, about being a mainstream group. Don't make me laugh please. No Kpop group will ever be mainstream in the west. There is a huge cultural difference. People still don't even know BTS' name. People who know their name knows it from the SNS and don't even like them. Think they are a "Chinese group with girly look".
Tell me what those physicals sales are for? Does anyone listen to the songs from a CD today? lol. Most of artists around the world doesn't even release a physical album anymore. If they do, it's limited.
It's stupid to compare the old times and now. Resources are different. What that user said doesn't sound different from saying Billie Eilish is better than Britney Spears and Rihanna because Billie does well in both physicals and digitals, Beyonce did well in physicals and Rihanna did well in digitals only.
edit: I've been into Kpop in the beginning of 2000. There have always been fans to death who claimed that no one will surpass their it group but I have seen that that situation has changed like 6-7 times. I remember myself claming that no one would ever surpass TVXQ in around 2009 but Bigbang got their it boy status. Just a few years ago, even here, fans claimed that no groups achieved what EXO achieved, and that no one would surpass them but BTS did. What's more, the records those groups have broken are considered nothing or not-important-at all now because people get used to it. When TVXQ got the first place on Oricon, it was something huge and considered as somethign no one would ever achieve. Tokyo Dome concert was the biggest headlines on newspapers. Now many groups can do it. When TVXQ sold 200K, people were like OMG. You can watch Epik High's interview, Tablo expressed his shock in TVXQ selling 300K copies. Today even unknown groups sell 200K. Everything gets normalized with the time.
