Thread by @sweetbtstea

SURPRISE THREAD: WHY BTS IS CURRENTLY SHAKING THE FOUNDATION OF THE US MUSIC INDUSTRY!

Totally not planned thread but I had some thing I wanted to say....and the thread wrote itself. So here we are. xD

Anyway, some people are still worried (why?) about BTS failing even as BTS is shaking the absolute crap out of the US entertainment industry.

Take a look at these projections for last week's BB200 chart.

Streaming is how many artists' sales are counted. Not pure sales, but streams. Depending on the artist, they may have most of their album sales as pure sales.

Ariana's sales were about 45% streams.

headlineplanet.com/home/2018/08/2…

Now, why is this important? Because BTS is an anomaly.

The majority of their sales are pure rather than streams. Not only that, but recently, their pure sales figures are stronger than other artists stream *and* pure sales totals.

BTS are showing they can move albums and singles in a market when people aren't buying music as much as they're streaming it.

BACKING UP: The Cold War Between The RIAA And American Households

Back when everything was CDs, people would often extract music files from these CDs and "burn" them onto blank CDs or just download songs as singles ... and then share them with other people.

Well, the US music industry did not like that. At all. The idea that people could download music without paying for it was horrific, and they started suing EVERYONE. Even someone's grandma.

eff.org/wp/riaa-v-peop…

In fact, it was the guilt trip campaign combined with these lawsuits and threats of lawsuits that caused one hell of a rift between the RIAA and the American public. Rather than understand that times were changing, the industry dug in its heels and cursed out the internet.

People were no longer interested in buying a whole CD to get one or two songs they might like. They wanted to download individual songs.

Apple saw a market and that's how we ended up with iTunes. But then, things changed again.

STREAMING: THE COMPROMISE THAT SAVED THE MUSIC INDUSTRY

Well, there was iTunes (a polite monopoly for the longest time), but still the music industry insisted that CDs were the dominant format and they continued to insist this even as MP3s fell out of fashion.

CD sales were in a free fall for most artists and the industry was hurting. And then a lone hero stood tall among the rubble. That hero, was Spotify.

theguardian.com/music/2018/apr…

Spotify debuted in 2008, promising that artists would get paid for their music. At a time when CD sales sucked and nobody was making the money they had in the past, this pledge meant a lot.

Spotify was a genius "freemium" product. You could listen to all kinds of songs for free -- but to get rid of mandatory adds, you paid for the service. The existence of ads AND subscribers made it possible to ensure that artists on the platform make money.

Since Spotify, other subscriber-only platforms popped up, from Apple Music to Amazon Unlimited. Now people just matter-of-factly subscribe to these services and stream.

And it was understood that the pure sales market was largely dead as the charts changed to reflect this.

BTS: A Throw Back To The "Golden Era"

Regardless of what the final tally is at the end of Week 1, BTS will have proven something startling: pure sales aren't dead for everyone and it's possible for a group to see a DRASTIC increase in a very short time.

BTS jumped from a debut pure sales figure of 31,000 to an estimated 155,000 - 185,000 in LESS THAN A YEAR.

https://twitter.com/btschartdata/status/1033415473931714565

On top of that, they're currently dominating the US iTunes chart in a way that no foreign language artists, especially East Asian artists have ever done in the history of the iTunes chart.

I can only imagine how rattled the industry is by BTS right now.

Rattled ... and curious.

You see, even though the stupid, shallow aspects of the media dismiss BTS as a "boyband" and ARMYs as "rabid fangirls," the smart people who matter and do numbers are paying attention.

While ARMYs are great for clout, we're uniquely great for something else, too: MONEY.

ARMYs are a spend-happy fandom in a market when people typically aren't. Free streams made it very easy for a lot of fandoms to push their faves up the charts.

But it's a new world.

While it will take time to see exactly how the Billboard rule change affects artists across the board, something in my gut tells me that BTS's US fans willingness to move to paid platforms at a higher rate than a lot of other fandoms. Especially K-pop fans.

BTS fans are always eager to spend money on BTS and anything associated with BTS. Once the two dots finally connect around this simple fact, I look for BTS to be the hottest property in the US entertainment industry.

Sure, there are those who will lose out to xenophobia and racism, but as the saying goes, "Money talks and bulls***t walks."

So don't get or be discouraged. The work we've put in this past year will manifest extremely positively in the future. You can count on it. :D