BTS’s fifth studio album, “ARIRANG,” held the top spot on Billboard’s main albums chart, the Billboard 200, for a second consecutive week — the first time any K-pop act has done so, according to Billboard’s own chart-preview report published April 5, 2026. The album stayed ahead of Kanye West’s (Ye’s) new release “BULLY” at No. 2 and Melanie Martinez’s “HADES” at No. 3.
The numbers behind the repeat are notable on their own terms: “ARIRANG” moved 187,000 album-equivalent units in the second tracking week, a 71 percent drop from its opening week — a steep decline that’s normal for any album’s second week, but one that still wasn’t enough to lose the top spot given how far ahead it had opened. Physical album sales alone accounted for 114,000 units, enough to also hold the No. 1 position on Billboard’s separate “Top Album Sales” chart for a second straight week, a sign that BTS’s fanbase is still driving purchases of physical copies at a scale most acts, Korean or otherwise, don’t sustain into a second chart week.
The milestone lands in the middle of what industry coverage has been calling one of K-pop’s most concentrated growth periods to date: members across multiple K-pop generations who spent recent years on military service or solo projects are returning to group activity in the same window, putting second-, third-, and fourth-generation acts on stages and charts simultaneously rather than in the usual staggered cycle.
Source: Billboard, April 5, 2026; Hankyung, April 6, 2026.
