Seventeen has released successful albums continuously over the past few years and has long been at the very top of the K-Pop industry. Last year, with their fourth studio album Face The Sun, the boy group showed that they are far from done and keep outdoing themselves. Face the Sun was in fact the second best-selling album of 2022, surpassed only by BTS Proof. So nobody doubted that the new album ‘FML’ would be successful too. But Seventeen still managed to surprise us:
FML is not only very successful, it has already made history!
Do you remember when the global boy group BTS broke every record in 2020 with Map of the Soul: 7? It is the best-selling K-Pop album of all time, but Seventeen’s FML has already broken a few of the records that album set!
The first record concerns pre-orders: FML was pre-ordered 4.64 million times, more than any other K-Pop album before it!
Until then, Map of the Soul: 7 had held the record with 4.02 million pre-orders for over three years, without anyone coming close. FML didn’t just come close, it surpassed the pre-orders of Map of the Soul by more than half a million!
Seventeen’s personal pre-order record was 2 million and was set almost exactly one year earlier by Face The Sun.
But that is only one of Seventeen's latest successes. On top of that, FML also sold more copies on the first day after release than any other K-Pop album!
FML was released yesterday, on April 24, after weeks of building anticipation with various teasers. According to Hanteo, fans bought over 3.99 million copies within the first 24 hours! (Hanteo is one of the two largest charts in South Korea and reports sales figures in real time.)
Seventeen’s personal record was 2.067 million copies sold of Face The Sun within the first week after release. With FML, the boy group already surpassed this number on the first day! The members also surpassed the record of BTS Map of the Soul: 7, which sold 2.65 million copies on its first day and remained unbeaten until yesterday.
So FML sold more copies on its first day after release than any other K-Pop album in the same period. On top of that, it is the first and so far only K-Pop album in Hanteo's history to sell more than 3 million copies on its first day. And by a wide margin, since the boy group almost cracked the 4 million mark! We are curious how long this record will stand, because nobody is likely to match it anytime soon.
And what happens next?
We will undoubtedly be able to congratulate Seventeen many more times. The boy group is well on its way to also breaking the records for the highest sales in the first week or the first month. FML is already the best-selling album of the year, and we believe it will hold this position until the end of the year.
It would be the first time in eight years that the best-selling album of the year doesn’t come from BTS! RM, Jungkook and co. took first place for the first time in 2016 with “Wings” and have claimed it every year since. Since the BTS members are currently going into the military one after another and won’t be releasing a new album as a group anytime soon, even they have little chance of still breaking Seventeen's record this year.
And another BTS record is in danger. With 5,022,204 copies sold (as of January 2023), Map of the Soul: 7 is still the best-selling K-Pop album of all time. Will Seventeen’s FML surpass this number?
If you haven’t watched the music video for the title track “Super” yet, you should definitely catch up on it:
How do you like the song? Did you buy FML? Let us know!
Sources: NME, List of best-selling albums in South Korea, Korea JoongAng Daily
