Aespa recently came back with their highly anticipated first-ever studio album, Armageddon.
While the song and its accompanying music video impressed Korean netizens and performed greatly on the charts, the same isn’t being said about their album sales.
The SM Entertainment girl group has always been known for their strong fanbase and, in turn, their high album sales.
On the first day of My World‘s release, the album sold more than 1.37 million copies.
Netizens were stunned by the difference and the low sales, especially with Armageddon having nearly 20 versions released.
Aespa recently came back with their highly anticipated first-ever studio album, Armageddon. While the song and its accompanying music video impressed Korean netizens and performed greatly on the charts, the same isn’t being said about their album sales.
The SM Entertainment girl group has always been known for their strong fanbase and, in turn, their high album sales. However, this was seemingly not apparent in the sales reported by the Hanteo Chart for Armageddon.
In a graphic posted on Instiz — which has since gone viral — one netizen compared the sales of aespa’s highest-selling album, My World, to Armageddon‘s. The difference shocked many netizens. On the first day of My World‘s release, the album sold more than 1.37 million copies. Meanwhile, Armageddon sold just over 515,500 copies in comparison.
Netizens were stunned by the difference and the low sales, especially with Armageddon having nearly 20 versions released.
“People are losing interest much faster than before.”
“Wow, only four members but 20 versions… They could have just released a few photobooks and one version of the CD per member. I wish all the idols would cut back a bit now that the inflation is starting to fade away…”
“Is China really that big of a market? I mean, that number is still high, but inflation was really severe.”
“Wow, 20 versions.”
“Why are there so many versions?? I get SMini, but what are My Power and Super Bing? What versions are those?”
“Isn’t the first-week sales count not finished yet?”
“This makes sense… As Min Hee Jin said, first-week sales can go up or down, so we shouldn’t always assume they’ll just keep going up by default.”
“When will the pre-orders be reflected?”
Though the difference with My World is massive and shocking, their previous release, Drama, had similar first-day sales to Armageddon. Drama sold around 530,000 copies—just a few thousand more than Armageddon.
Thus, while netizens can be shocked at the numbers, fans are not. In fact, they have named several reasons why the decrease in numbers could have happened.
The majority of the responsibility is put on SM and Kakao Entertainment as fans accuse the companies of not properly stocking and distributing albums, causing the sales to be spread out during the first week rather than the majority being sold on the very first day of release.
kakao fucked up aespa’s sales AGAIN.. the sales were stuck for 4 hours fuck u for doing this to their first full album — ༺☆༻ (@wnrinae) May 27, 2024
Secondly, fans theorize that My World had bigger hype around it, as the comeback came after a 10-month hiatus from the girl group. Different from My World, Drama and Armageddon releases happened only a few months after each other. This could have affected the sales as most fans wouldn’t have had the time to save up a lot of money and purchase multiple copies.
Fans and netizens alike mention the support of Chinese fans. Chinese K-Pop fans’ album consumption has changed a lot in recent years, with some groups’ Chinese fanbases purchasing close to less than 75% of the amount of albums they used to. With Ningning and Karina‘s huge fanbases in China, it’s likely their drop in purchased albums plays a big part.
All 4 members’ Chinese bars boycotted the album… that’s nearly 1 million copies right there — bigbigtam (@tamkacheong) May 27, 2024
sm better make changes if they don't want nnbar to start boycotting https://t.co/c29vJrgIcK pic.twitter.com/kpUoiTcc0E — may (@ningnyangi) March 3, 2024
Nevertheless, several K-Pop groups are selling much less copies than they used to. And aespa doesn’t seem to be exempt from that list.
