How’s TXT doing on the Billboard charts?

FEATURE

The group reached number one on the 200 and Artist 100 at the same time

2023.02.20

Credit

Article. Seo Seongdeok (Music Critic)

Photo Credit. BIGHIT MUSIC

For the week of February 11, TOMORROW X TOGETHER’s album The Name Chapter: TEMPTATION debuted at number one on the Billboard 200. Sales for the first week, which ended on February 2, totaled 162,000 units, made up of 152,000 physical albums and 13.24 million streams (the equivalent of roughly 9,000 copies). The majority of sales were CDs, which accounted for 149,000 units; the album wasn’t released in any other formats like vinyl or cassette. Fourteen different versions were sold, including special editions at Barnes & Noble and Target, a limited edition from Weverse and signed copies from the group’s official US website.

TOMORROW X TOGETHER has so far had all seven of their albums placed on the Billboard 200. The best performers were The Chaos Chapter: FREEZE (number five) and minisode 2: Thursday’s Child (number four), but now TEMPTATION has gone on to be their first number-one album. Excluding their two Japanese albums, every album has charted higher and faster than the previous.

Physical album sales are still important for the Billboard 200 other than with genres that see particularly strong streaming performance like hip hop. That’s especially true for K-pop groups, who have loyal fan bases. TOMORROW X TOGETHER has been number one on the Top Album Sales chart with every release since Blue Hour, but it takes something more to go beyond that and top the Billboard 200. A look at the weekly sales figures behind the group’s number-one albums show the journey they took to get them there: Blue Hour sold 18,000 copies, FREEZE sold 39,000, Thursday’s Child 66,000 and TEMPTATION 152,000. What we’re basically seeing here is a numerical representation of the size of TOMORROW X TOGETHER’s fan base.

The competition they were up against for number one was SOS by SZA and Gloria by Sam Smith. SOS had been the biggest hit of 2023 to date, sitting at number one for seven weeks—until last week. It fell to second for the week of February 11, still selling an impressive 100,000 copies. If SOS had managed to hold on to number one for an eighth week, it’s very likely it would’ve gone on to become the first R&B/hip hop album to top the chart for nine weeks since Drake’s Views. Gloria, meanwhile, was one of the most talked-about albums in January on the back of the hugely successful single “Unholy.” Other than that song and the newer single “I’m Not Here to Make Friends,” however, the album didn’t perform particularly well where streaming is concerned. In the end, it came in at number seven with 390,000 copies sold.

That same week, TOMORROW X TOGETHER was number one on the Artist 100 chart—a first for the group. The only other K-pop artists to top the Artist 100 have been BTS (21 times), BLACKPINK (twice), SuperM and TWICE (once each). For reference, the Artist 100 chart aggregates sales using a similar method to the Billboard 200—counting album and track sales as well as radio airplay and streams—but measures an artist’s overall performance rather than an individual album. People usually talk about the Artist 100 and Billboard 200 together, but it’s extremely difficult to top both at the same time. There’s also the Hot Trending Songs chart, which makes its list based on Twitter buzz, where the five tracks off TEMPTATION hit numbers one, three, five, seven and 15.