When someone asks why girl groups in kpop usually sell fewer albums than boy groups, the answer is usually that fandoms of male idols are a lot more dedicated and willing to spend on their faves. What this framing ignores is that many female pop artists in the west have dedicated, album-buying fandoms very similar to kpop boy groups.
Here are the first-week pure sales for the latest albums by several top female pop artists in the US. These aren’t the totals including streaming-equivalent units, but rather the number of actual direct purchases of the album.
| Artist | Album | First-week Pure Sales |
|---|---|---|
| Taylor Swift | The Life Of A Showgirl | 3,479,500 |
| Olivia Rodrigo | you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love | 273,000 |
| Sabrina Carpenter | Man’s Best Friend | 224,000 |
| Billie Eilish | Hit Me Hard And Soft | 191,000 |
| Ariana Grande | petal | 168,000 |
| Beyoncé | Cowboy Carter | 168,000 |
| Lady Gaga | Mayhem | 136,000 |
| Madonna | Confessions II | 114,000 |
| Gracie Abrams | Daughter from Hell | 77,000 |
These numbers are all higher than those for the top kpop girl groups’ latest releases in the US and (excluding Ms. Swift) on about the same level as top boy groups.
You might say, “But the market for western pop artists in the US is much bigger than the market for kpop. You’d have to compare these numbers to those of western male pop artists to see how well female artists are activating the total album-buying audience.” The difficulty with this is that the western music industry right now has barely any male pop artists of note. I looked up the pure first-week numbers for recent albums by western male artists you could vaguely classify as “pop” and compared them.
| Male Artist | Latest First-week Pure Sales | Female Artist | Latest First-week Pure Sales |
|---|---|---|---|
| The Weeknd | 359,000 | Taylor Swift | 3,479,500 |
| Harry Styles | 291,000 | Olivia Rodrigo | 273,000 |
| Noah Kahan | 175,000 | Sabrina Carpenter | 224,000 |
| Twenty One Pilots | 169,000 | Billie Eilish | 191,000 |
| Morgan Wallen | 133,000 | Ariana Grande | 168,000 |
| Bruno Mars | 93,500 | Beyoncé | 168,000 |
| Alex Warren | 55,000 | Lady Gaga | 136,000 |
| Conan Gray | 53,000 | Madonna | 114,000 |
| Ed Sheeran | 51,000 | Gracie Abrams | 77,000 |
Of the male artists, only Harry Styles and Conan Gray are ones whose target audience is typical pop stans. If Justin Bieber had sold physical copies of his latest album in its first week, it would have helped establish a better baseline. Nevertheless, I think it’s already clear from the data that female artists are capable of activating album-buying from consumers as much as or more (in Ms. Swift’s case, much more) than men.
*****
So the limiter on kpop girl groups’ sales can’t simply be that fans are more willing to spend on male artists.
Women in western pop–especially Taylor Swift–have recently been using a very kpop-like bag of tricks to sell their product, including releasing large numbers of physical “variants” and making special content available only with certain album versions. The irony is that these tricks have been more effective for western female artists than for actual female kpop groups.
What could kpop girl groups do to convince fans to buy albums the way Taylor Swift, Olivia Rodrigo, and Sabrina Carpenter fans do?
submitted by /u/eveningsnewestetoile
[link] [comments]
