You don’t need us to tell you that the BTS comeback album ‘Arirang’ was a hit in its first week. But you might need Luminate’s number-crunchers to tell you exactly how big the album was in streaming terms. Thankfully, they have.
“Looking at global streaming data, ‘Arirang’ earned 739.1 million On-Demand Audio (ODA) streams in its first week alone,” reported Luminate on its blog.
“That tally makes it not only easily the biggest album of 2026 so far in terms of first-week performance but the highest Week 1 total since Taylor Swift’s Life of a Showgirl (1.3 billion global ODA streams) in October.”
Also interesting: the breakdown of those streams by country. The US accounted for 115m of them – nearly 15.6% – making it the biggest individual market. But second and third were Brazil (78.6m streams) and Mexico (75.9m).
Luminate also has some data on Netflix documentary ‘BTS: The Return’, which was released a week after the album. It claims that the film racked up 11.3m minutes of watch-time on its first day alone.
