BIGBANG's reunion is selling the back catalogue, not the new single
Streams of BIGBANG's songs on Melon rose 333% in August from the previous month, the platform's data unit said on Tuesday, two weeks after the group played its first concerts in nine years.
The song that moved furthest was "Haru Haru", released in 2008. Melon Data Lab said it re-entered the Top 100 at No. 91 and climbed to No. 67, drawing close to three times the streams it had averaged before the reunion shows.
YG Entertainment released a new single, "BiiiG", on 19 August, BIGBANG's first record in four years and four months. It went to No. 1 on Melon's Top 100 and on the platform's daily singles ranking.
The commercial weight of a twentieth-anniversary reunion sits in the material the audience already owns, though, and the routing has been built around that. Catalogue is the asset being reactivated. The single is the reason to reactivate it.
Melon streams of the group's older songs rose 333% in August.
YG's tour listing has BIGBANG playing one night at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium on 26 September, one at the Stade de France a week before that, and one at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey. In Asia it has three nights at the Taipei Dome, three at Kai Tak in Hong Kong and three at the Kyocera Dome in Osaka.
Demand in Korea has not been the constraint. Tickets for the three Goyang Stadium dates that opened the tour on 21 August sold out in 22 minutes when they went on general sale through Coupang Play in June, according to the Korea Herald.
What Europe does not support is a residency, and the tour is built to find the places that do. The Japanese dome run and the three-night stands in Taipei and Hong Kong are where a reunion converts twenty years of familiarity into repeat attendance from the same city.
Those are also the markets where the recorded catalogue still earns. Japan has been BIGBANG's second home since the Kyocera Dome shows of the early 2010s, and it is the one territory on the routing where physical sales and dome capacity both hold up.
A YG Entertainment representative said in June, when the tour was announced, that the stages would span the past, present and future of K-pop.
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Streams of BIGBANG's songs on Melon rose 333% in August from the previous month, the platform's data unit said on Tuesday, two weeks after the group played its first concerts in nine years.