New BTS hit Butter melts YouTube, Spotify records

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This article was published 26/05/2021 (1932 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

As K-pop continues its smoothly choreographed dance to world domination, BTS’s latest juggernaut hit, Butter, has already shattered records since its release Friday.

The South Korean boy band’s second English-language single hit 3.9 million “peak concurrents” (maximum number of simultaneous users) in its first 24 hours, according to the YouTube Music Team, the platform’s official blog.

That topped the previous record: three million for BTS’s first English-language single, Dynamite. The new video also topped Dynamite’s record of 101.1 million views in 24 hours with 108.2 million.

Butter garnered nearly 209 million YouTube views in just over four days. Yes, that’s a lot, but it has a ways to go before eclipsing Dynamite, which has more than one billion views since its August 2020 release.

But that’s not all! Though Butter didn’t match Dynamite’s No. 1 debut on Spotify’s Global Top 50 chart (don’t shoot the messenger, ARMY; blame that darn talented Olivia Rodrigo and Good 4 U), it set Spotify’s first-day streaming record with 20.9 million “unfiltered” global streams (and 11.042 million filtered).

That huge disparity between filtered and unfiltered has to do with the way Spotify determines whether streams are legitimate, and has miffed BTS stans.

Spotify states in its user agreement that “artificially increasing play counts” is prohibited. Its counting system has stymied fans’ efforts to churn out even richer numbers for Butter, as the service doesn’t allow the use of AI bots and caps the number of repeat plays by individual users in 24 hours.

As Twitter user @btsworldwider explained, “Streams being filtered bc Spotify removes streams they considered ‘spams’ bc people keep streaming incorrectly (Looping same song).” The site spotifycharts.com specifies rankings “are generated using a formula that protects against any artificial inflation of chart positions.”

And Butter boosting is a co-ordinated effort. Twitter user @BorahaeFunds_DA, a BTS fan group, tweeted line graphs tracking Butter’s performance on Spotify, saying, “We continue to fall just short for Day 3 for Butter — we are on pace with (dynamite emoji).”

BTS fans are upset enough with Spotify’s counting policies that they have managed to get the hashtag #InvestigateSpotify trending on Twitter. In the meantime, they can bask in the many records BTS’s new release has set, and keep trying to push it to more new standards.

By the way, on Tuesday’s Spotify chart, Butter holds at No. 2, and Rodrigo, who released her debut album last week, occupies 10 of the Top 16 positions. We’re just saying.

— Los Angeles Times