US overtakes Japan as top buyer of K-pop albums — 'No CD player, but I'll still buy BTS'

Streaming has become the standard in the music industry. Yet physical albums keep selling — and sales are actually growing. At the center of it all is K-pop, led by BTS.

South Korea's exports of physical music albums surged 125.0 percent year-on-year in the first half of this year to $257.48 million, the highest first-half figure on record, according to Korea Customs Service trade statistics released Friday. The United States led all markets with $74.12 million in imports, overtaking Japan for the first time to become the largest buyer of Korean albums. China ranked second and Japan third.

Global entertainment data firm Luminate attributes the shift to K-pop creating "a new consumption formula for the music industry."

Luminate's recently released 2026 Mid-Year Music, TV & Film Trends report said K-pop — centered on BTS — is rewriting the structure of the global music industry, from album sales and retail distribution to fandom culture and music exports.

Even in the streaming era, the US physical album market is posting unexpected growth.

CD sales in the United States reached 16.3 million units in the first half of this year, up 16 percent from the same period last year — far outpacing the 2.4 percent growth recorded by vinyl.

Luminate CEO Rob Jonas credited much of that growth in the report to BTS's new album Arirang.

Strip out BTS and other K-pop acts and US CD sales growth falls to just 6.7 percent — meaning K-pop has in effect driven the recovery of the American physical music market.

The US CD chart makes the shift even clearer: eight of the top 10 CD albums in the United States in the first half of this year were K-pop releases.

BTS's fifth studio album Arirang topped the chart with 567,000 copies sold. Enhypen's "THE SIN : VANISH" followed with 286,000 copies, and Ateez's "GOLDEN HOUR : PART 4" and "PART 5" came in third and fourth with 263,000 and 212,000 copies respectively. Cortis's "GREEN GREEN" sold 169,000 copies for fifth place. Stray Kids' "DO IT" (141,000 copies, sixth), Tomorrow X Together's "7TH YEAR: A Moment of Stillness in the Thorns" (123,000 copies, seventh) and Korean-American girl group Katseye's "SIS: Soft Is Strong" (106,000 copies, tenth) rounded out the top 10.

Perhaps more telling is why fans are buying CDs at all. According to Luminate, roughly half of Generation Z and millennial CD buyers in the United States do not own a CD player. Physical albums have become less a medium for listening and more a symbol of fan support — a collectible and a piece of merchandise. The report said K-pop fandoms are leading this shift in consumer culture.

K-pop fans' buying habits are redrawing the US album retail map.

As fans flock to hypermarkets such as Target and Walmart to buy K-pop albums packed with photo cards and physical extras, the mass-market share of physical album sales has expanded to 28.7 percent. A US retail landscape once dominated by independent record stores and online shops is changing because of K-pop. In South Korea, K-pop albums are already available at convenience stores.

Luminate assessed BTS not merely as the face of K-pop but as an act that moves the global pop market itself.

The report described the Arirang album — which features both English and Korean tracks — as a growth driver for both pop and K-pop as distinct genres, and called K-pop "a core pillar driving the global pop market" rather than a separate regional genre.

As the K-pop fandom expands in scale, Korean-language music is claiming a larger presence. Korean music's share of the US streaming market rose from 0.7 percent in 2023 to 1.1 percent in the first half of this year. Luminate classified Korean alongside English and Spanish as a standalone language category in this report — a symbolic shift signaling that Korean-language music is no longer a passing trend or a subset of "non-English music," but a pillar of the global music market in its own right.

The K-pop fandom driving the US album market proved to be the most powerful and engaged consumer base of any genre. Luminate compared fan purchasing activity and engagement across genres and found that K-pop fans form what it called a "high-density fandom" — buying albums and merchandise while also attending performances, participating in online communities and staying active on social media. The report called K-pop "the most complete fandom model, where purchasing and engagement happen at the same time."