As interest surges in a free concert at Gwanghwamun in Seoul announcing the full-group comeback of BTS, the music video for the new song has surpassed 30 million views.
As of 10 a.m. on the 21st, the music video for "Swim" (SWIM), the title track of BTS' fifth studio album Arirang (ARIRANG) released on YouTube at 1 p.m. the previous day, reached 10 million views in about 1 hour and 50 minutes and surpassed 31 million in 20 hours.
Immediately after release, "Swim," which landed at No. 1 on YouTube's Music Trending chart in Korea, also reached No. 1 overseas as of two hours after release, including in the United States, the United Kingdom, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Norway.
Interest in the BTS comeback also showed up on Netflix. Mobile Index said on the 5th that new installations of the Netflix application (app) in Korea totaled 33,745. Compared with the 4th (7,547), that was an increase of about 347% in a day.
The surge followed BTS posting a trailer video and poster for the comeback concert "BTS The Comeback Live: Arirang" (BTS THE COMEBACK LIVE | ARIRANG), to be held at Gwanghwamun Square, on its official social media at 9 a.m. on the 5th.
BTS will livestream the concert, which takes place at 8 p.m. on the 21st at Gwanghwamun Square in Seoul, on Netflix. People who find it hard to attend in person installed the app to watch the live broadcast.
Netflix will exclusively livestream the concert to about 190 countries and regions worldwide. This is the first time Netflix has livestreamed a music concert by a single artist.
In the week leading up to the concert, Google saw a real-time surge in searches for BTS-related keywords.
Google Trends ranked "BTS Gwanghwamun concert" as the No. 3 trending keyword with rising real-time searches in Korea over the past seven days. Google users searched the term about 20,000 times during the week.