The “successors” of BLACKPINK and NewJeans – BABYMONSTER and ILLIT, are frequently pitted against each other.
BABYMONSTER – the “little sister of BLACKPINK“, has officially made their debut with the 7 members lineup along with the mini album “BABYMONSTER” and the title track “Sheesh”.
Despite high expectations for this debut with the return of member Ahyeon, BABYMONSTER’s digital music achievements do not show many promising signs. Specifically, the title track “Sheesh” has not entered the top Spotify Global Chart on the first day. After 9 hours, it only reached about 820 thousand streams.
Meanwhile, the case is different for ILLIT – a group considered as BABYMONSTER’s “rival”. In particular, the “little sister of NewJeans” has set a record as the only female K-pop group to enter the top Spotify Global on the first day of releasing their debut song. The group’s debut title “Magnetic” also achieved 2.1 million streams within 24 hours and excellently reached #1 on MelOn Top 100 as well as many other impressive achievements on various charts.
On the other hand, Korean media sites recently reported that BABYMONSTER officially broke the debut album sales record of female groups in the first week. Accordingly, after 7 days of sales, the album “BABYMONS7ER” recorded a sales figure of 392,293 copies, becoming the debut album of the female group with the highest first-week sales on Hanteo. This achievement also broke the previous record of ILLIT (380,056 copies).
So far, the Top 5 debut album sales of K-pop female groups are:
- “BABYMONS7ER” – BABYMONSTER: 392,293 copies
- “Super Real Me” – ILLIT: 380,056 copies
- “New Jeans” – NewJeans: 311,811 copies
- “Fearless” – LE SSERAFIM: 307,450 copies
- “Savage” – aespa: 276,877 copies
Additionally, according to the latest rankings released by YouTube on April 7 (compiling data from March 29 to April 4), the title track of BABYMONSTER’s 1st mini album – “Sheesh” was ranked first on the platform’s weekly global music video chart. “Sheesh” also maintained the top spot for 4 consecutive days after its release.
Furthermore, the track also shows evenly distributed popularity in mainstream pop music markets such as the US, UK, Canada, South Korea, and Japan. It also ranked second on the weekly global famous song chart with 70 million views (as of 5 p.m. on April 7)
Source: K14
