[Hanteo News = Reporter KANG SUYOUNG] This year’s first-half K-pop physical album market is showing unusual momentum.

 

According to Hanteo Chart on the 8th, physical album sales in the first half of 2026 reached 49.53 million copies, surpassing the first half of 2023, which recorded 46.17 million copies in the year with the highest annual sales of all time. Compared to the same period last year, which recorded 40.12 million copies, this marks an increase of about 9.4 million copies.

 

To understand why this record is meaningful, it is necessary to look at the flow of the K-pop physical album market. Even before the pandemic, the physical album market had been steadily growing. It had been on an upward curve, recording 13.79 million copies in 2017, 16 million copies in 2018, and 18.57 million copies in 2019. In 2020, when concerts were completely suspended due to the pandemic, spending on concerts shifted to physical albums, causing sales to explode. Even after concerts resumed in 2022, that trend continued, and in 2023, sales reached an all-time high of 103.3 million copies. Afterward, the market entered a lull, recording 86.95 million copies in 2024 and 86.24 million copies in 2025. Although the momentum of 2023, the peak year, had weakened, the figure was still more than four times larger than 2019’s 18.57 million copies, the year right before the pandemic.

 

However, the figures for the first half of 2026 have overturned that flow once again. The record is even more notable in that it came at a time when the concert market has fully normalized. There is the variable of the full-group return of mega IP BTS, but this alone is difficult to explain the trend. Excluding the 4.16 million copies in initial chodong sales of BTS’ fifth full-length album, “ARIRANG,” the combined initial chodong sales of the remaining 14 albums that achieved million-selling status reached about 22.6 million copies, a level comparable to the combined total of about 23.27 million copies recorded by 12 albums in the first half of 2023.

 

Structural changes are also noticeable. In the first half of 2023, two teams recorded more than 4 million copies in initial chodong sales: SEVENTEEN with 4.55 million copies and Stray Kids with 4.61 million copies. In the first half of 2026, BTS was the only team to exceed 4 million copies, but the number of teams that achieved initial chodong million-seller status increased from 12 to 14. ALPHA DRIVE ONE, ENHYPEN, ATEEZ, BLACKPINK, BTS, TOMORROW X TOGETHER, PLAVE, NCT WISH, &TEAM, TWS, CORTIS, TREASURE, BOYNEXTDOOR, and RIIZE were named on the list. In particular, ATEEZ achieved million-seller status twice, in February and June, while relatively newer groups such as NCT WISH, which debuted in February 2024, CORTIS, which debuted in August 2025, and ALPHA DRIVE ONE, which debuted in January 2026, also joined the ranks of million-sellers. This is a sign that the structure is changing into one in which various teams are evenly generating sales, rather than relying on the performance of specific teams.

 

Only half of the annual figures for 2026 have been released so far. Looking at Hanteo Chart data, from 2021 to 2025, sales in the second half of each year surpassed those of the first half every year. If the same trend continues this year, the annual figure is highly likely to greatly exceed the first-half total. This is why attention is being focused on 2026 annual sales.

 

grace@hanteo.com

 

 

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