BTS drew 840,000 attendees across 15 shows in five cities on the North American leg of its Arirang world tour, the group's label BigHit Music said on the 30th.
Starting on the 25th of last month at Raymond James Stadium in Tampa, United States, BTS held shows in El Paso, Stanford, Las Vegas and Mexico City. All shows sold out, and additional dates were added in Tampa, Stanford and Las Vegas, which also sold out.
U.S. music outlet Billboard said BTS topped April's Top Tours, grossing $76.2 million (about 114.8 billion won) and selling 417,000 tickets from eight shows in Goyang, Tokyo and Tampa during April. In particular, the three shows in Tampa set the month's highest gross and largest attendance for a single venue.
The results are exceptional even compared with BTS' past North American tours. According to Billboard, the average gross per show in Tampa and El Paso was $12.1 million (about 1.82 billion won), up about 64% from the previous U.S. tour.
Local media said BTS' popularity is spreading into broader interest in Korean culture. Dafna Zur, a Korean studies professor at Stanford University, told local outlet ABC7 San Francisco in an interview, "Unlike other foreign languages, where enrollment is stagnating or declining, there is tremendous interest in Korean language, Korean history, Korean culture, Korean literature and sociology."
Meanwhile, after wrapping the North American shows, BTS will meet domestic fans at Busan Asiad Main Stadium on the 12th–13th of next month. The group will then kick off its European tour in Madrid, Spain, on the 26th of the same month and embark on the second leg of the North American tour in August, starting in East Rutherford, United States.