SM Entertainment
In South Korea, it’s not uncommon for K-pop acts to sell over a million albums throughout their career. But Baekhyun, a member of boy band EXO, is a rarity: on July 1, EXO’s company SM Entertainment shared over social media that his May EP Delight is the first Korean album by a soloist to sell over 1 million copies since Kim Gun-mo’s 2001 album, Another Days.
Since its release on May 25, Baekhyun’s second solo EP Delight reportedly sold a total of 1,018,746 as of June 30, surpassing his first EP, 2019’s City Lights. That album was the best-selling Korean album by a soloist of the 2010s, with over half a million album sales recorded.
Delight’s lead single “Candy” created a viral trend with its own “CandyChallenge” hashtag, as people across the globe performed the song’s sugar-coated choreography. (The same hashtag is also full of children eating candy across various social media apps, but the two viral trends don’t appear to have any connection.)
To celebrate the historic feat of becoming the first soloist in nearly two decades to sell over 1 million albums in South Korea, Baekhyun shared a video with EXO’s fans, known as EXO-L, on Twitter. In it, he thanked them for their support and expressed hope that they’ll be able to meet together offline in the future but currently, due to the state of the world amid the global covid-19 pandemic, looks forward to meeting them again online.
Album sales are generally extremely healthy in South Korea, where acts like BTS and EXO have regularly sold millions of copies as physical album sales have become a mainstay in the K-pop scene. But that wasn’t always the case: not a single album sold over 1 million copies in the country between the early ‘00s and mid ‘10s, not until EXO’s XOXO sold 1 million copies in 2013, the first album to do so since 2001. Since then, South Korean album sales records have regularly been broken, with each year pushing the milestone forward. The current best-selling Korean album of all time is April’s Map of the Soul: 7 from BTS, which took the title from that act’s Map of the Soul: Persona, which made history last year when it became the best-selling South Korean album of all time.
The intro of this article was updated to emphasize that the record refers explicitly to album sales by a soloist.
