For a brief period, the megastar boy band BTS’s hiatus seemed to have stalled the enormous growth of the worldwide K-pop industry. In 2024, two years after the group paused for its seven members’ mandatory military service, Korean album sales dropped 19 percent, and no Korean act cracked the year-end Top 10 in the United States.
But the genre roared back last year thanks to a different, unexpected juggernaut: the animated film “KPop Demon Hunters,” which became Netflix’s most-watched movie to date and resulted in K-pop’s first-ever Grammy (a best song written for visual media win for “Golden” last month). The boy band Stray Kids spent two nonconsecutive weeks atop the Billboard 200 album chart. NewJeans, a creatively adventurous girl group, stayed in the news while fighting (unsuccessfully) to leave its label.
The K-pop landscape BTS returns to Friday with its comeback album “Arirang” looks quite different from the one it left four years ago, raising a few questions: Is the genre as a whole diminished? Did BTS’s absence simply leave a vacuum that only the megawatt group could fill? And can it pick up right where it left off?
“The genre’s in a strong position,” said Frankie Yaptinchay, an industry relations executive for the streaming service Amazon Music. “When a marquee act re-enters the genre, it draws attention back to the broader pool. This is going to be good for everybody.”
More than just a marquee act, BTS turned K-pop into a global phenomenon. The group of singers, rappers and dancers had obvious pop appeal and an aggressive management company, Big Hit, which understood how to build a worldwide fan base through social media. In 2016, BTS quickly sold out four U.S. arena concerts and added two more to meet the demand; in 2018, it was the first K-pop group with a No. 1 album on the Billboard charts; the year after that, its TikTok account became the fastest ever to reach 1 million followers.
BTS and its powerful Korean music company Hybe, which owns Big Hit, are doing their best to ensure the reunion’s commercial success, scheduling 82 stadium concerts in 34 worldwide cities; securing a Netflix livestreaming deal for the first show; and recently draping New York, London, Seoul and other big cities in promotional “What Is Your Love?” walls made of roses. The tour’s 41 North American dates sold out a total of almost 2.4 million tickets in early March.
“It’s like a military operation. They’re not working for failure,” said Carl Mello, the brand engagement director for the New England music retailer Newbury Comics. Shin Cho, A&R marketing director for Universal Music Korea, said the genre benefits from its own experience. “There’s a basic formula and principles in the K-pop industry,” he said. “It’s been built up for decades.”
In the four years since BTS hit pause, Hybe and its K-pop rivals have focused on breaking multiple worldwide stars, beginning with Blackpink — a girl group that has amassed more than 40 billion streams, according to Luminate — plus Stray Kids, Enhypen, Ateez and Tomorrow X Together; BTS solo projects by Jimin, Jungkook and others; and newer acts like Le Sserafim, the “KPop Demon Hunters” star Ejae, and Plave, a virtual group recently dominating the Korean pop charts and Asian arenas. Even during the malaise of 2024, many of these artists sold hundreds of thousands of CDs in the U.S. In 2025, Blackpink’s Rosé scored a smash with “Apt.,” a kicky collaboration with Bruno Mars that was nominated for a top Grammy.
But Lim Hee-yun, a Seoul-based culture critic and music journalist, said the “next tier” of K-pop stars has yet to achieve worldwide dominance the way BTS did with “Love Yourself: Tear” (2018), its first of several No. 1 albums. Based on sales and streaming data, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry ranked BTS the No. 1 artist in 2020 and 2021, but after the group’s hiatus, Taylor Swift has taken its spot.
“We are already starting to worry about the K-pop phenomenon coming down,” Lim said. “The younger groups, like Enhypen or Le Sserafim, are doing really well, but we don’t see the phenomenon-level cultural global impact from them,” Lim added. “They don’t come off like BTS or Blackpink right now.”
Hybe’s 2025 financial results didn’t paint a rosy picture: Although the South Korean company reported annual revenues of more than $1.86 billion, up more than 17 percent from the previous year, its operating profits decreased 73 percent, to about $35 million. On a recent earnings call, Lee Kyung-jun, the company’s chief financial officer, attributed the drop to restructuring its American business as well as breaking new artists such as the K-pop-adjacent girl group featured in the 2024 Netflix series “Popstar Academy: Katseye.”
The “resumption of BTS activities,” Lee said, will help Hybe “deliver more solid and stable financial performance in 2026.” (Representatives for BTS and Hybe declined to comment.)
In that sense, the BTS comeback has been heavily scrutinized, and not just by the group’s powerful fan base, known as the BTS Army. BTS has yet to release any of its new tracks, but it recently announced that the producers on “Arirang” include established Western hitmakers such as Diplo, Mike Will Made-It, Ryan Tedder and Kevin Parker of the indie-rock band Tame Impala.
Tamar Herman, a veteran music journalist who analyzes the genre in her Notes on K-pop blog, said that BTS has not had a bona fide tour since 2019, when the group sold 1.6 million tickets worldwide, grossing nearly $200 million, according to Billboard Boxscore; its follow-up tour, in 2020, was abruptly canceled because of the pandemic. In the nearly seven years since BTS’s last major trek, other K-pop stars have rushed into the live-music void, but none has matched its success: Stray Kids grossed $186 million in 2025 with the year’s 10th-biggest tour.
“There’s a lot of pressure. The group has expectations to do well,” Herman said. “The die-hard fans are obviously still there, but in K-pop, when a group has gone on hiatus, some fandoms disperse. Fans will go to a new artist or move on.”
Although a spokesperson for Live Nation declined to discuss the BTS tour it is promoting, Michael Harrison, senior vice president of global touring for the concert promoter AEG Presents, cited recent arena tours by Blackpink and Ateez and a planned upcoming Enhypen tour as examples that “the whole country is really going K-pop crazy.”
“If anything, the BTS hiatus gave a lot of other groups the time and space to develop into arena or stadium acts,” Harrison said, noting that K-pop fans spend $70 to $80 per person on merchandise sales at shows: “Higher than a lot of Western artists.”
And the emergence of another K-pop force last year, he noted, certainly didn’t hurt: “‘KPop Demon Hunters’ has really opened up other demographics for the North American market to K-pop.”
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