BTS Smash Several Records With ‘Dynamite’

It’s been just nine hours since South Korean stars BTS dropped their brand new single “Dynamite,” but several records have already been shattered.

The vibrant, uplifting music video for “Dynamite” saw the biggest YouTube live premiere in the website’s history, raking in–according to YouTube’s live counter–3 million concurrent viewers. Fans and news reports claim a peak of over 4 million viewers, but exact numbers are yet to be shared by YouTube. Prior to “Dynamite,” South Korean girl group BLACKPINK’s single “How You Like That” held the record for the biggest premiere, with 1.65 million concurrent viewers. “Dynamite” also appears to be the fastest music video in history to surpass 10 million views in 21 minutes and, as of this article, sits at a whopping 53 million views. It’s possible that over the next few hours, “Dynamite” will break the record biggest 24-hour YouTube debut for a music video–a title previously also held by “How You Like That.”

In addition to YouTube, “Dynamite” broke records on several streaming services and charts; the track has become the fastest song in iTunes history to reach Number One in over 100 countries–all within just eight hours of its release. This is BTS’ fifth song to achieve this milestone and was preceded by “My Time,” “Black Swan,” “Moon,” and “Your Eyes Tell,” (all from the group’s latest LP Map of the Soul: 7) plus vocalist V’s solo venture with “Sweet Night” from the OST of the popular Korean drama Itaewon Class. The previous artist to hold this record was British pop singer Adele, with 2015’s “Hello.” This also makes BTS the first and only artist in history to achieve over 100 Number Ones on iTunes with songs in three different languages–Korean, Japanese and English. 

While YouTube has yet to confirm any of the above numbers for “Dynamite,” the track’s performance based on what audiences can see so far still bodes extremely well for how it performs on the Billboard Hot 100; it might even score BTS their first Number One on the chart. Additionally with the single in English, it’s possible BTS will achieve more milestones when it comes to radio play, whether it’s in the U.S., U.K., India or anywhere else in the world.

BTS detailed the disco-funk track in a press conference earlier this morning, with leader RM explaining, “The release of ‘Dynamite’ wasn’t planned at all. We were working on our album since the beginning of this year and ‘Dynamite’ was one of the songs we met in that process. It was a light, fun song that didn’t have any seriousness and cheered us up a lot. We wanted to share this energy with our fans as quickly as possible and decided to release it early, something we’ve never done before.”

Rapper SUGA explained the message of “Dynamite” is to uplift and encourage everyone in the midst of COVID-19, assure them they are not alone in everything they have faced in 2020. “I would say it is dedicated to all the people in the world who feel like they fell down while they were running a marathon,” he says, adding that it’s exactly how the band felt as a whole when their ‘Map Of The Soul’ tour was canceled earlier this year. “It made us feel very powerless, frustrated. It felt like we were running this whole time, but now we had tripped and fallen.”

Last week BTS announced an ‘offline and online’ concert titled ‘Map of the Soul ON:E.’ Set to take place over October 10th and 11th, 2020, the concert will be the septet’s first ‘in-person’ concert of this year. Fans theorize that the concert will feature performances from Map of the Soul: 7, which were originally meant for the ‘Map Of The Soul’ tour. Earlier this year, the group attempted to make up the postponement of the tour to fans with Bang Bang Con (a two-day long stream of their older concerts) and Bang Bang Con The Live (a mini-concert/gig), both of which drew a record-breaking number of viewers. The numbers for Bang Bang Con The Live were particularly powerful and unprecedented for any live-streamed show–the gig pulled a paying audience of over 756,600 fans across 107 regions.