BTS and their fans have good reason to celebrate “Dynamite” holding steady atop the Hot 100. In a year dominated by one-week No. 1 singles that quickly tumble down the charts, BTS has defied the odds two weeks in a row. While the Korean pop septet effectively crossed the final frontier of pop superstardom by scoring their first No. 1 hit last week, they have reinforced their longevity and ever-growing fanbase by retaining the crown.
The week-two metrics for “Dynamite” are encouraging across the board. Columbia Records’ massive nationwide radio campaign continues to pay off, as the song received 16 million radio airplay audience impressions, a 38% boost over the previous week, Billboard reports. “Dynamite” also earned BTS a new career peak on the Pop Songs radio airplay chart, ascending from No. 20 to No. 18, and gave them their debut on the Adult Pop Songs chart, entering at No. 29.
As expected, “Dynamite” also topped Billboard’s Digital Song Sales chart for a second week with an extraordinary 182,000 downloads, down 31% from last week’s 265,000. It’s the first song to sell over 180,000 downloads in each of its first two weeks since Justin Timberlake’s 2016 smash “Can’t Stop the Feeling!”, and it now claims the two best sales weeks of 2020. It dipped from No. 3 to No. 9 on the Streaming Songs chart, racking up 17.5 million U.S. streams, down 49% from the previous week.
For comparison, Taylor Swift’s chart-topping “Cardigan” fell to No. 8 on the Hot 100 in its second week, dipping 48% in streams (17.5 million) and 88% in digital sales (8,000).
Swift is far from the only artist to suffer a precipitous drop from No. 1 in 2020. Other one-week chart-toppers from this year include:
Lady Gaga & Ariana Grande, “Rain on Me” (No. 5 in week 2)
The Scotts, “The Scotts” (No. 12 in week 2)
Ariana Grande & Justin Bieber, “Stuck with U” (No. 13 in week 2)
6ix9ine & Nicki Minaj, “Trollz” (No. 34 in week 2)
These songs reflect an increasingly common trend of front-loaded singles that enjoy explosive first weeks on the Hot 100, typically bolstered by a slew of merchandise/single bundles, only to fade into obscurity a few weeks later. In many cases, one could make a compelling argument that the Hot 100 is a better measure of who can sell the most branded sweatpants or socks than who has the most popular song in the United States on any given week. Plenty of artists have mastered the game of propelling their new singles to No. 1; fewer have mastered the art of keeping them there
Case in point: Of the 43 songs that have debuted at No. 1 in the history of the Hot 100 (eight in 2020 alone), “Dynamite” is only the 20th to hold the top spot in successive weeks. Not only did “Dynamite” debut above BTS’s previous Top 10 singles “On” (No. 4) and “Boy with Luv” (No. 8), but it continued to thrive on the Hot 100, whereas “Boy with Luv” fell to No. 40 in its second frame and “On” fell to No. 68.
The continued chart success and stellar week-two sales of “Dynamite” prove one of two things: Either BTS’s fanbase has grown dramatically, or it’s stayed the same size and each fan has gotten a lot richer. Considering the global pandemic that continues to wreak havoc on people’s bank accounts, I’m inclined to believe the former. BTS fans routinely mobilize to buy and stream the group’s music en masse and pool their resources to help fans in need, and with six different versions of “Dynamite” available, they had plenty of purchasing options. Still, it’s difficult to imagine every BTS fan shelling out money for all those versions of the track. It seems more realistic that diehard fans continued to buy and stream “Dynamite” in large quantities, while new fans downloaded the original version. This combination of old and new fans likely propelled the track to stratospheric sales for two weeks in a row.
Of course, skeptics will still try to trivialize BTS’s success, writing off “Dynamite”’s chart-topping run as a product of rabid fans inflating sales by downloading multiple copies. If you didn’t catch the absurdity of that argument the first time, go back and read it again. Haters will say that because BTS has a lot of passionate fans, their success is somehow less valid than their Western pop star peers—even though having a lot of passionate fans is the very definition of success. Every major pop artist cultivates a dedicated fandom that helps them achieve varying degrees of success. BTS is currently dominating the music industry because their fandom is one of the biggest, and vice versa. And, as I’ve written many times, they’ve done it without the help of bundles.
In reality, the people making these bad-faith arguments are frustrated and intimidated by BTS’s global—and particularly stateside—success. As I wrote last week, BTS has had to work twice as hard as their Western contemporaries to build their audience and earn respect. Years of hard work have paid off, and it’s virtually impossible for Western gatekeepers to ignore them now.
To deny BTS’s superstar status after topping the Hot 100 last week would be an act of willful ignorance; to do so after they stayed there would be outright lunacy. BTS’s two-week hold atop the Billboard Hot 100 is a testament to their ever-growing fanbase and sustained longevity—and next time they release music, it might just prove to be their new normal.
