In 2023, Jimin enjoyed a remarkably successful year as a solo artist, breaking several sales records both domestically and internationally with his album ‘FACE’ and single ‘Like Crazy.’ His achievements were particularly noteworthy considering he managed this without the typical industry support like radio play, playlist inclusion, or advertising campaigns to broaden his global audience, which could have further boosted his sales and streaming numbers. Despite these challenges, he continues to establish himself as a highly sought-after artist worldwide.
A recent article by K-Pop columnist Isaac Choi in Kyunghyang Shinmun, titled “K-pop, Cynicism Increased and Fantasies Decreased,” highlights Jimin’s achievement in another area. The piece reveals that Jimin had the most ‘organic’ sales among the top 10 albums of 2023 on the Circle Album Retail Chart. This means there was the smallest disparity between the number of albums his label reported as shipped and the actual number of albums sold in retail stores to music consumers.
“While big entertainment companies such as HYBE have been promoting their unprecedented quarterly sales throughout the year like horse racing broadcasts, total album sales, the key performance indicator, are measured differently from the actual sales. According to Circle Chart’s rules, there were 34 unique albums that sold more than a million copies, but this is based on the number of albums shipped by the company. According to the Retail Album Chart that reflects the number of actual albums sold from retail stores, there are only 8 albums that sold over a million copies.
Jimin’s “FACE” retail album sales/album sales ratio is 87.82%, the closest to unity of all albums in the top 10 of the Circle Retail Album Chart. In other words, Jimin’s album had the smallest difference between shipments of albums and actual sales.”
As previously reported regarding year-end ranking for Circle Retail Album Sales, Jimin’s ‘FACE’ ranked as the best-selling album by a Korean soloist in the history of Circle album chart, having exceeded 1.65 Million copies, as of August 10, and closing the year at a combined 1,497,786 sales (for both regular and Weverse versions) on the Circle Yearly Retail Album chart. As such Jimin became the soloist with the most retail album sales in a single year in the history of this chart since its inception in 2019. Additionally, ‘FACE’ became the bestselling album by a solo artist on the yearly retail album chart in the history of Circle Chart.
Time and again, real data shows the high demand for Jimin’s music all around the world.