BTS, ARMY, and the Meaning of Popularity

Even if someone doesn’t know everything about the Korean pop supergroup BTS they probably know that they’re very popular. However, the exact shape of and reason for that popularity seems to mystify and, at times, infuriate those whose job it is to understand and analyze what it means to be popular in today’s cultural landscape.

This week, BTS current single “Butter” is spending its 13th week inside the top 10 of the Billboard Hot 100 charts. It spent 9 weeks at number one, including a #1 debut with the highest points total the Billboard chart had ever seen, comprising single day streaming records on YouTube (108.2 million views in 24 hours) and Spotify (20.9 million unfiltered streams in 24 hours) and digital sales that were higher than the rest of the top 10 combined (Forbes June 7 2021).

However, if the talking heads are to be believed, this does not make BTS popular. Why? Because the numbers are driven by BTS’ fandom, ARMY, which dedicates itself to the group’s success through passionate and targeted streaming and buying efforts. Never mind that there are million of ARMYs (BTS has 38.4 million Twitter followers and 56.7 million subscribers to its YouTube channel), the implication is that fans do not equal popularity.

So what does it mean to be popular?

An intuitive understanding is that popularity means being a “household name,” someone your grandmother knows, the songs you hear while you’re shopping for groceries. It’s the celebrities, and songs, and movies, and TV shows that everyone has a passing familiarity with even if they don’t follow them. However, does that kind of popularity still exist or is it a fantasy of a bygone era? Anxiety around popularity is anxiety about culture — about having a shared frame of reference that connects us as a society.

Part of living in a post-modernist world is that culture is increasingly fragmented. TV shows don’t draw numbers like Friends did, different generations of people use different social networks, playlists are personalized. The trend in entertainment has been going from mainstream towards niche for a long time now.

In many ways, this is a very good thing. It means entertainment becomes more diverse, and has the space to appeal to a wider range of people, to tell a wider range of stories. However, there are certainly people who preferred the old ways of “one size fits all” entertainment, especially if those people were part of the group that was historically dominant and heavily catered to.

Which brings me to the next objection that is often levied against BTS’ success — that it’s not “organic.”

Just like “popularity,” “organic” is a nebulous and often fraught concept. It vaguely implies a natural progression to success and cultural relevance, presumably based on the inherent quality and appeal of the cultural product. Something that’s organically popular deserves to be so, because it’s just that good.

In the wake of Butter’s success, one article went so far as to claim that the pop charts are now “useless” because ARMY is large, powerful, and well-organized enough to consistently put BTS on top. Last year, when BTS’ first number one single, Dynamite, was released, there were similar concerns that ARMY was engaging in unhealthy and unfair “overconsumption.”

These arguments rest on the assumptions that high sales and streams can be “manipulated,” whereas a higher number of listeners via radio or casual streaming (often via curated playlists, like Spotify’s most-followed playlist “Today’s Top Hits”) is a better barometer of the tastes of the general public. Unfortunately, this narrative operates on backwards logic. The thinking is that radio and playlists are a reflection of what the general public wants to hear. In truth, it’s largely the opposite: radio and curated playlists are almost entirely a product of industry promotion.

So this whole “organic” argument is naive and short-sighted — most of the songs on the charts are about as organic as, let’s just say, margarine. Organic success is a myth; there’s always someone pulling the strings.

The real question is, who should be pulling the strings?

At its core, anxiety about popularity is anxiety about who holds power to decide what is culturally relevant. Of course, those who have historically held this power are sounding the alarm. It’s hard to argue that BTS’ results are actually inorganic — after all, what’s more organic than fans buying music? But that means fans are actually pulling the strings, and that terrifies some people.

Fans — and especially the BTS ARMY — are active, informed, organized, and incredibly effective. They engage how and as much as they want, and they cannot be easily controlled by industry maneuvering. We’re seeing the rise of fans in more and more areas of popular culture, and we’re seeing just as many attempts to rein in, dismiss, and criticize fans whose behavior is considered excessive. For example, Spotify filtered almost half of Butter’s first-week streams under the guise of preventing “streaming manipulation” and removing suspicious bot-like streams. However, my guess is that “streaming manipulation” is just the acceptable PR line to penalize fan behavior that they consider to be excessive and, therefore, threatening to established business models.

Calling fans “excessive” is how society has always tried to put fans in their place. Historically, fans were always regarded as “small but vocal” niche groups — they may be really passionate, but they couldn’t really generate cultural impact on the scale of the elusive “general public.” When popular culture was more unified, fans were easier to dismiss, so the media treated them as a novelty and an oddity. However, ARMY has repeatedly shown that they are a fandom that cannot be ignored. The Billboard Hot 100 is considered a difficult achievement, even for big-name artists. The fact that BTS and ARMY can and do bend the Hot 100 to their will is a hugely important cultural shift that should be celebrated, not dismissed.