BTS’s Latest Album Is Outselling The No. 1 Title Of 2020 In The U.S. 32 Times Over

When BTS’s latest album Map of the Soul: 7 debuted atop the Billboard 200 back in early March, it managed to open with the largest one-week sum of the year. That honor was snagged by The Weeknd’s After Hours not long after, but the Korean septet has continued to move tens of thousands of units of their new set every frame, and the title has sold particularly well, especially when compared to other chart-topping releases.

In fact, while a number of other popular albums have moved more equivalent copies than Map of the Soul: 7 when streams and individual track purchases are combined to create hybrid album units, nobody has been able to outsell BTS this year…and their dominance over the best-performing title of 2020 underlines just how much more successful the group is when it comes to selling music.

Currently, Roddy Ricch’s Please Excuse Me for Being Antisocial reigns as the biggest album of 2020, though it may lose that title soon. According to data shared by BuzzAngle via HitsDailyDouble, that set has now shifted just over 1.06 million copies in this year alone. It sits just a few thousand units ahead of After Hours, which is the only other album to move at least one million copies so far this year. These numbers aren’t what Billboard uses when compiling its weekly charts (that information comes from Nielsen Music), but the two companies typically report figures that are very close to each other, as the methodology that Nielsen and BuzzAngle use aren’t drastically different.

That 1.06 million number is largely made up of streaming equivalent copies, as Ricch’s debut full-length hasn’t been able to sell very well in 2020. In fact, it pales in comparison to Map of the Soul: 7, which continues to rule as the most-purchased title of the year.

So far in 2020, according to HitsDailyDouble’s latest weekly chart, Map of the Soul: 7 has sold 488,000 copies. Please Excuse Me for Being Antisocial has only managed to sell 15,000 actual copies. For those doing the quick math, BTS’s latest has sold more than 32 times as many albums as Ricch’s first proper release in 2020, and that gap is sure to only continue to widen as the weeks and months progress. The rapper’s project is still going strong, but its glory isn’t backed primarily by sales, and every frame, BTS outsells the former chart-topper by many multiples.

Map of the Soul: 7 may end up closing 2020 as the bestselling album, depending on what else comes along that could topple it, but it is certainly going to enter 2021 as one of the most-purchased titles of the year, even if fans didn’t buy one more unit.