BTS isn’t just topping charts this year — they’re rewriting their label’s balance sheet. HYBE Music Group reported its highest quarterly revenue on record for the three months ending June 30, and the company is crediting most of that growth directly to BTS’s ARIRANG album and the world tour built around it.
The numbers are staggering even by K-pop’s usual standards. HYBE pulled in 1.45 trillion Korean won, roughly $987 million, in total quarterly revenue, alongside an operating profit of 170.9 billion won, about $116 million — both all-time highs for the company. Operating profit alone jumped nearly 160% compared to the same quarter last year, while total operating expenses rose 100% to almost 1.3 trillion won, or $871 million, reflecting just how much the company scaled up to support a global stadium tour of this size.
Most of that growth traces back to what HYBE calls “artist direct involvement revenue” — a category covering recorded music, concerts, advertising, and appearances. That segment alone brought in 1.04 trillion won, or $708 million, a 132% jump from a year earlier. Revenue from everything else, including merchandise, licensing, content, and fan club memberships, added another 410 billion won, or $279 million, up 59% year-over-year. In short, touring and music sales did the heavy lifting, but nearly every corner of the business grew alongside it.
The tour numbers explain why. BTS had the highest-grossing and best-attended tour of any act in May, pulling in $127.8 million and selling 641,000 tickets across just 12 shows between May 2 and May 28. That single month outpaced the biggest monthly gross any group had posted since the industry’s major touring chart launched in 2019, surpassing even the Rolling Stones’ previous record. It marked BTS’s second consecutive month at the top of that chart, and their fourth month at No. 1 overall since the ranking began. Only five acts have spent more total time in that top spot: Bad Bunny leads with nine months, Beyoncé, Coldplay, and Elton John have each logged seven, and Trans-Siberian Orchestra has five.
The ARIRANG album itself has had staying power to match the tour. It debuted at No. 1 in more than 25 countries when it dropped in March, and this week it jumped back into the top ten of the national albums chart, climbing from No. 26 to No. 9, thanks to a newly released vinyl picture disc edition carrying two bonus tracks. That kind of mid-cycle chart resurgence is rare for an album already four months into its release, and it speaks to how actively HYBE is keeping the era alive through physical-format variants and new content drops.
BTS has also kept a packed promotional schedule outside of touring. On July 19, the group co-headlined the halftime show at the FIFA World Cup final alongside Shakira, Madonna, and Justin Bieber, performing their 2020 breakout hit “Dynamite” in front of one of the largest global audiences of the year. Meanwhile, the group is now shifting focus to “Normal,” the ninth track on ARIRANG, which begins its run at pop radio the week of July 27 through Interscope/Capitol Records. That follows “Swim,” the album’s lead single, which debuted at No. 1 on both the national singles and albums charts simultaneously back in April — the group’s seventh time topping both rankings at once.
All of this comes just months after BTS completed a years-long hiatus while all seven members fulfilled South Korea’s mandatory military service, making ARIRANG their first new album since 2020’s “Be.” The record was built with an unusually wide net of outside collaborators, including longtime producer Pdogg alongside Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker, Flume, JPEGMAFIA, Mike WiLL Made-It, Ryan Tedder, El Guincho, and Teezo Touchdown. The tour supporting it now spans 85 shows across five continents and runs through March 2027, with the vast majority of dates already sold out.
For HYBE, the message from this earnings report is straightforward: with BTS back at full strength and touring at a pace few acts in music history have matched, the company’s best quarter yet likely won’t be its last.
