South Korean media company, Big Hit Entertainment, recently announced their plan to go public this year and provided several updates about their music groups, including plans for a virtual BTS concert this fall.
What We Know:
- Big Hit Entertainment, the label that manages boy-band BTS, held a corporate briefing on Thursday. The company revealed that they saw revenues of 294 billion won ($244.8 million) and operating profits of 49.7 billion won ($41.4 million) over the last six months. Even though the pandemic canceled or altered many of their artists’ events, online concert and merchandise sales allowed for a 27% increase in profits. Big Hit is working on an initial public offering (IPO) with a listing planned for this year. Some analysts predict the IPO could value Big Hit at 4 trillion won ($3.4 billion).
- In addition to the financial wins, Big Hit announced several exciting projects for their artists. BTS will be holding a virtual concert in October titled Map of the Soul ON:E. The company also announced upcoming albums from BTS, Tomorrow X Together (TXT), and NU’EST. Additional releases include a Korean language-learning course, the upcoming BTS film Break The Silence: The Movie, and a new book titled The Most Beautiful Moment in Life: The Notes 2, which is another literary installment in the “BTS Universe”.
- Big Hit’s cash cow is BTS, the seven-member K-pop group. BTS quickly rose to global prominence, becoming the first group since The Beatles to have three Billboard No. 1 albums in a year. The group has broken YouTube records with their music videos and their concerts sell out within seconds. In addition to BTS, Big Hit manages TXT and owns the labels which manage Seventeen and GFriend. The Big Hit groups dominated South Korea’s album charts this year, making up 40% of all album sales. The new BTS album Map of the Soul: 7 sold over 4.26 million copies.
BTS had planned a world tour for this summer, but most of the concerts were canceled. Instead, the group held a virtual concert in June which sold 756,000 tickets, equivalent to about 15 stadium concerts.
