Kory Grow
Contact Kory Grow on X View all posts by Kory Grow July 15, 2026
BTS. Todd Owyoung/NBC/Getty Images K-pop fans have fueled an unusual surge in physical album sales in 2026 according to Luminate’s midyear report. Fans of BTS, Enhypen, and Ateez notably showed out in droves at stores like Target and Walmart to buy their favorite artists’ albums. The burst in interest was most notable with CD sales, which are up 16 percent this year; K-pop albums accounted for nearly 10 percent of that figure.
BTS’ Arirang has sold 567,000 CDs so far this year, while Enhypen’s The Sin: Vanish sold 286,400 CDs and Ateez’s Golden Hour: Part 4 sold 263,000 CDs. The report mentions that about half of Gen Z and millennial consumers who buy CDs do not own a CD player, showing that compact discs are now affordable novelties to some. Arirang topped Luminate’s both vinyl and CD sales charts.
Coupled with streaming numbers for K-pop and the Latin explosion in recent years, the dominance of English-language music is on the decline. Anglophone music now represents only 87.1 percent of streams with Spanish songs accounting for 9.4 percent and Korean music holding steady from fiscal year 2025 at 1.1 percent. Bad Bunny’s Debí Tirar Más Fotos accounts for 1.54 million album-equivalent streams this year, while BTS’ Arirang accounts for 1.49 million. Arirang alone made South Korea the world’s third largest music exporter behind the U.S. and U.K. respectively.
“Casual U.S. listenership of Latin music has hit an all-time high, with 54% — or more than one in two music listeners — now reporting that they engage with the genre,” Jaime Marconette, Luminate’s vice president of music insights and industry relations, told The Associated Press. “Latin music’s cultural footprint is rapidly widening far beyond its traditional core base into the broader American mainstream.”
