BTS 'ARIRANG' tour hits $204M in two months as K-pop album exports to the US surge 300%
BTS drew 130,000 fans across two London nights and grossed $204M on their world tour. US K-pop album exports hit $57M in the first five months of 2025—up 300% year-on-year.
BTS pulled 130,000 attendees across two nights at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium in London on June 6–7. Their ARIRANG world tour revenue keeps climbing.
Billboard puts the tour at $204 million (approximately ₩315.8 billion) in just over two months. Tickets for LA and Chicago sold out on Ticketmaster. SoFi Stadium is fully sold out as well. Stray Kids filled the same Tottenham Hotspur Stadium for two nights last year—the venue is becoming a benchmark for K-pop's stadium-tier acts.
The sellouts sit against a broader picture. Luminate's 2025 year-end report found more than 1 in 3 K-pop listeners in the United States qualify as superfans, well above the 20% average across all genres. K-pop's active fan rate—the share that converts to paid spending—sits at 78%, compared to 69% for pop overall.
Physical sales back that up. Circle Chart recorded consecutive months above 10 million copies sold in April and May 2025. First-half 2025 cumulative album sales reached approximately 55 million copies, up roughly 11 million from the same period last year.
The US is now the top destination for K-pop album exports. Customs Service trade data for January–May 2025 shows the US at $57.086 million, ahead of China ($45.968 million) and Japan ($42.551 million). That's up more than 300% from the $13.871 million recorded in the same window last year.
Not every act is riding the wave cleanly. IVE cancelled all 10 cities of their North American tour, a move that rattled the industry. The second half of the year will test demand further: BIGBANG, NCT, and Stray Kids are all set to launch tours.
One industry official noted that major teams with strong fandom power are unlikely to be seriously hurt by ticket trends even at larger scale. But since multiple groups' weight classes have grown simultaneously, precise demand forecasting by region and period is necessary (the genre-wide consumption pattern means popularity isn't concentrated on any single act).
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