Did K-pop boy band SuperM cheat their way up the Billboard charts?

Oct 22 , 2019

K-pop boy band SuperM top the Billboard 200 Chart with their debut album, but are engulfed in controversy over album bundling. Photo: SM Entertainment

The seven-man South Korean supergroup start their North American tour, ‘We Are The Future Live’, on November 11 with gigs in Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, Seattle and Vancouver

Boy band SuperM is the first K-pop act to secure No 1 spot on the Billboard 200 Chart with their debut album of the same name, but the group have been stirring heated debate among international fans and media over album bundling issues.

SuperM – comprising members of K-pop bands under SM Entertainment’s management, including SHINee, EXO, NCT127 and WayV – reigned atop the chart by selling 168,000 “equivalent album” units during the first week of its release (October 4-10.) Among the units, 164,000 came from physical album sales, while 4,000 were from streaming.

The figures show that the seven-member group – composed of SHINee’s Taemin, EXO’s Baekhyun and Kai, NCT127’s Taeyong and Mark and WayV’s Ten and Lucas – sold a massive number of albums, but people are wondering whether they could have reached the milestone without album bundling.

SuperM released eight versions of the album, had more than 60 merchandise/album bundles on web stores and included digital copies of the album for every ticket to their North American tour slated for November, reports said.

Are these acceptable tactics? Or did the band go too far?

Korea Times spoke with Jeff Benjamin, a New York-based music journalist who has been writing about K-pop for Billboard since 2013, for some insights.

Benjamin said he was hardly in a position to say whether the strategies were acceptable (because he was a writer, not a person from the charts department) before answering the questions.

“I don't think many groups, if any, could create this type of excitement over both their music and merchandise unless it was a major supergroup like SuperM did,” he said.

“People bought the albums because of their love for SuperM members. If the album sales are ‘boosted’ and there isn’t true demand, I believe that will show in the future concert tour dates if they struggle to sell tickets. One person may buy multiple albums, but one person cannot fill multiple seats.”