The remarkable 1st day sales of BlackPink’s album: Achieving half of TWICE’s 1st week sales only in 1 day

Since their comeback about 1 week ago, BlackPink has became a great rival for every artist on both Korean and international digital charts. From extraordinary digital achievements to Youtube view records, BlackPink has them all. Still, there is one thing about BlackPink’s comeback that arouses everyone’s curiosity: BlackPink’s ability to sell album, are they as good as other girl groups in the same generation at selling album?
While other girl groups like TWICE, Red Velvet, G-Friend, MAMAMOO,… have released a great amount of albums, as for BlackPink, it was not until this comeback did they release their very first album. Moreover, for some reasons, YG Entertainment decided to not release the physical mini album until June 20th, 5 days after the releases of digital album and Youtube MV. Therefore, during the past few days, both fans and non-fans were looking forward to the release of the physical version of “Square Up”. They not only wanted to own their idols’ music product but also desired to evaluate the ability to sell albums of a girl group coming from YG, a company not famed for high physical sales compared to the other two companies from Big 3.
However, despite the doubt from K-pop fans, BlackPink once again proves their top position in Korean showbiz. Until June 20th, the first day of “Square Up” mini album’s offline release, 41.961 copies of this album were sold. This was a remarkable album sales figure for a girl group, as considering album sales, girl groups are always considered not as good as boy groups.
BlackPink’s “Square Up” album topped Hanteo daily chart on June 20th
Even though according to YG’s announcement, “Square Up” physical album would be released on June 20th, on June 19th, fans already discovered some statistics about the early sales of BlackPink’s album (around 19.000 copies). This figure confused many fans as they didn’t know on which day the album sales started to be counted. When fans contacted Hanteo, this site explained that the early sales for “Square Up” announced on June 19th originated from some online retail stores, but the official version would only be released on June 20th. So, basically, the first day sales of “Square Up” would be the sum of the sales from both June 19th and 20th. This meant BlackPink sold around 42.000 albums only within one day.
But no matter it was the sales figure of 1 or 2 days, this was still an outstanding achievement of BlackPink in their very first time to sell a physical album. Compared to other new generation girl groups’ album sales, those of YG girl group were even more impressive. In terms of the first week album sales of Kpop girl groups in 2018 so far, BlackPink officially surpassed 3 other popular girl groups, including Red Velvet, G-Friend and MAMAMOO, to reach the 2nd position. Currently, BlackPink’s first week album sales figure was only lower than TWICE’s (109.474 copies of “What Is Love?” sold in the first week). However, a noteworthy thing was that BlackPink’s sales were counted in only 1 day, so we have to wait and see whether or not BlackPink can take the 1st rank from TWICE.

Highest first week sales on Hanteo in 2018 by girl groups (so far):
#1 TWICE — What is Love? 109,474
#2 BLACKPINK — SQUARE UP 41,961 (2 days of sales)
#3 Red Velvet — The Perfect Red Velvet 31,768
#4 GFriend — Time for the moon night 31,540
#5 MAMAMOO — Yellow Flower 28,240

— BLACKPINK Charts (@ChartsBlackPink) June 20, 2018

With the good situation at present, fans are expecting “Square Up” to sell more than 100.000 copies in its first week. Certainly, this is not an unrealistic expectation as the sales figure of “Square Up” has been increasing every hour, the album keeps topping the Hanteo chart despite the fierce competition with other popular artists such as BTOB or Taeyeon.

Sources: tinnhac