BTS have become the first group to rack up more than 10 billion streams in one calendar year, their agency BigHit Music said on Friday, October 16. Solo acts including Taylor Swift, Ariana Grande and Bad Bunny have cleared that bar before, but no band or vocal group had.
The jump is steep. BTS logged about 4.5 billion Spotify streams last year, so 2026 represents growth of roughly 122 percent, and it still has more than two months to run.
Arirang does the heavy lifting
Most of that came from Arirang, the septet’s fifth full-length studio album, released in March. It had passed 5 billion Spotify streams by Wednesday, the highest total for any album released on the platform this year. Olivia Rodrigo’s You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love sits a distant second at around 2 billion.
The album announced itself immediately: BTS drew some 130 million streams on release day, and all 14 tracks, including the instrumental “No. 29,” occupied the top 14 positions on Spotify’s Daily Top Songs Global chart.
The news landed mid-tour. The Arirang world tour, which opened in Goyang, South Korea, on April 9, has the group in Santiago, Chile, for three concerts through Saturday, followed by three shows each in Buenos Aires and São Paulo later this month. The closing nights in those two cities will be screened live in cinemas worldwide on October 24 and October 30. Dates in Asia, Australia and the Middle East are lined up after that.
In the same week, BTS also picked up Artist of the Year at the 2026 MTV Video Music Awards Japan.
Image: BTS. Photo: BIGHIT MUSIC, via Korea JoongAng Daily.
Sources: Korea JoongAng Daily, The Korea Herald.