Forty thousand tickets sold out in two hours, an extra concert announced, social media chaos, people camping outside concert venues. This treatment is usually reserved for when Paul McCartney, Madonna, or U2 hold concerts in Brazil. This week, however, the target of Brazil’s adoration and obsession is BTS: the K-pop band taking the world by storm.
The band’s members—RM, Jin, Suga, J-Hope, Jimin, V, and Jungkook—have become global phenomena, with the international press drawing comparisons between them and The Beatles. In fact, the boys are the first to have three albums at the top of Billboard 200 ranking in less than a year since the Fab Four—not to mention they are the first K-pop artists to ever reach the top of the North American Billboard list. Still in their twenties, BTS also became the first K-pop group ever to win a Billboard Music Award prize and the youngest people ever to receive the fifth-class Hwagwan Order of Cultural Merit from the Korean Popular Culture & Arts Awards.
On social media, their fanbase reaches 20 million followers on Twitter, 18 million on Instagram and 8.6 million on Facebook—which explains how they won the Favorite Social Artist award at the American Music Awards. On Spotify, they reached 18.5 million monthly listeners and got the second spot on the list of Global Recording Artists of 2019 in industry association IFPI’s Global Music Report. Not bad for a group that has only been around for six years.
The Love Yourself: Speak Yourself tour kickstarted on May 4 at the Rose Bowl stadium in Pasadena, and has sold out tickets in every North American venue, as well as Wembley Stadium in London and the Stade de France, in Paris. So far, tour revenues are estimated at USD 72 million. São Paulo will be the second stop of the tour—the only one in Latin America—and promises to be remarkable.