BTS is no doubt one of the biggest boy bands around today. In the past few years alone, they have been a dominating force on social media. The group’s accounts have millions of followers, and their fans can often be seen promoting them in various corners of the internet.
Despite BTS’s success, there are still many people around the world who refuse to give them a chance. The reason has often been cited as people’s unfamiliarity with K-pop and the Korean language, which BTS usually sings in. However, some fans are now theorizing that it could be something else holding BTS back.
BTS still struggles to findmainstream success in Western countries
Although BTS may be everywhere on the internet, that has nottranslated evenly into mainstream success in the U.S. and other Westerncountries.
For example, the group still lacks radio airplay, which isoften an indicator of how popular an artist is to the average American.
Additionally, BTS is sometimes not considered to be on thesame level as successful Western artists despite having a large fan base, highstreaming counts, and a lot of music sales. In 2019, MTV receivedbacklash from fans when the Video Music Awards only nominated BTS in the newK-pop category as opposed to much bigger categories like “Artist of the Year”or “Video of the Year.” Fans were outraged because the group has achieved asmuch – if not more – than people like Taylor Swift, Ariana Grande, BillieEilish, and the Jonas Brothers.
Some fans believe more peoplemight be interested in BTS if they heard other songs in their albums
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While there are arguably many reasons why someone would not be interested in BTS, a fan on Reddit suggested the group could pull in even more supporters if non-fans could hear their non-single tracks.
“I think BTS has better side tracks than the main title tracks,and if people would actually give some time to listen to the whole album, doyou think it will be easier for them to get into BTS?” one person asked.
Another fan agreed, writing: “It has irked me so much since2018 that they promote some of their weaker tracks and leave their best songswithout any promotion, or worse, on Soundcloud.”
Meanwhile, another user shared an anecdote as a testament tohow good BTS’s non-single tracks are. “I played ‘Singularity’ and ‘134340’ tomy work colleagues and they said ‘Wow! This is BTS??!!’”
However, many fans still believe that, even if BTS has many great songs hidden in their albums, the fact that they are a K-pop group and sings mostly in Korean is still a barrier which keeps a lot of people away.
Can BTS and K-pop ever beaccepted by mainstream music fans?
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Although BTS has many things toovercome, the popularity of K-pop is growing every day. Thanks to the internet,countless people are discovering the genre and falling in love with itsartists.
In fact, BTS’s 2019 single, “Boy With Luv (ft. Halsey),” charted at number 8 on the Billboard Hot 100, and their latest hit, “On,” went all the way up to number 4. This proves getting a high chart placement is an achievable feat for the group, especially when a lot of music listeners these days are getting their fix from streaming services instead of radio stations. BTS tends to do really well when it comes to acquiring streams, so perhaps it is only time before they can master the trick of getting number one hit singles.
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