The long-awaited return of K-pop boy band BTS could provide HYBE with a massive financial boost in 2026. As the K-pop group prepares its return following a three-year hiatus, Billboard estimates that a new BTS album and tour could generate more than $1 billion in revenue from concerts, merchandise & licensing, album sales and streaming over a 12-month period.
The breakthrough group, which brought K-pop to mainstream audiences in the West and first topped the Billboard Hot 100 with “Dynamite” in 2020, has been on hiatus since 2022. Its members dutifully performed their mandatory military service and, for some, launched successful solo projects. BTS’s members reunited for the first time on July 1, saying they will release a new album in the spring of 2026. More details arrived on Thursday (Oct. 16) when BTS member RM told fans to “look forward to late March” and said the group needs to prepare the album, shoot photos and film the music video.
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A BTS reunion tour stands to be the biggest component of the group’s return. Hyundai Motor Securities analyst Kim Hyun-yong estimated the comeback tour will feature approximately 65 shows and have an average audience of roughly 60,000. A typical K-pop tour is shorter, but BTS’s 2018-2019 Love Yourself World Tour consisted of 62 shows in 14 countries and played a mix of stadiums and arenas. Since the group is more popular today, the average venue size would probably be larger. And given BTS’s long absence and global popularity, HYBE may not want to leave money on the table.
A BTS tour in 2026 would benefit from ongoing price appreciation as well as strong fan interest. Prices for the top 10 stadium shows are on the rise, according to Billboard Boxscore, reaching $150.94 in North America, $121.12 in Europe and $110.57 in the rest of the world in 2024. From 2022 to 2024, prices increased an average of 4.1% annually in North America, 9.2% in Europe and 13.6% in the rest of the world. Assuming the same rates of inflation, 65 shows evenly spread across the three regions with an average of 60,000 fans each would produce 3.9 million tickets at an average cost of $150.29, for gross sales of $664.1 million. For context, Coldplay had the top-grossing tour of 2024, which generated $401 million from 3 million tickets across 51 concerts.
Concert merchandise, combined with online sales and other licensing revenue, could also produce a huge sum. According to atVenu’s 2025 Fan Spending Report, the average K-pop fan spends about $50 on merchandise at concerts, and up to 37% of K-pop fans purchase merchandise. But not every fan goes to concerts, so online sales and licensing add to overall merch sales. Billboard’s K-Pop Fandom in the U.S. survey found that 85% of K-pop fans buy merchandise and 47% attended a K-pop concert in the previous 12 months. So, concert attendance of 3.9 million works out to $72.2 million of merchandise sales (47% of BTS fans will attend the show, and 37% of them will buy merchandise at the concert). That suggests that 68% of BTS fans would buy merchandise elsewhere. Sticking with $50 per head, that works out to $280 million of merch sales online, at pop-up stores and through other sources. That brings total merchandise sales to $352.7 million.
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Album sales are an integral part of any K-pop group’s business. Given pent-up demand for new material, BTS will likely match the sales of its last album, Proof — an anthology with three new tracks, including “Yet to Come” — that reached No. 13 on the Hot 100 and No. 1 on the Billboard Global Excl. U.S. chart. Proof sold approximately 2.7 million units in South Korea in its first week. By the end of 2022, the collection had sold 422,000 units in the U.S., according to Luminate, and 601,000 in Japan, according to HYBE’s Q4 2022 earnings presentation. That puts Proof well above 4 million units in 2022 globally. A new BTS album could conservatively sell 4 million units at $20 apiece over 12 months, bringing in $80 million in gross sales.
Streaming revenue from BTS’s new music will also be lucrative for HYBE. Figuring out how much the new songs could earn on streaming requires estimating the incremental impact of a new batch of recordings. In 2022, when Proof was released, BTS accounted for 9.22 billion more global on-demand streams than it will generate this year, according to Luminate. If BTS’s streams in 2026 reach the level set in 2022, those incremental 9.22 billion streams will generate $33.2 million.
Those four segments — concerts, album sales, merchandise & licensing and streaming — add up to $1.05 billion.
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To be sure, the amount that will hit HYBE’s income statement will be less than $1.05 billion. Ticket sales, for example, represent a gross amount paid by fans for primary tickets, not the amounts the group or HYBE will earn for the performances. Merchandise and album sales figures are based on retail amounts, which captures the level of consumer spending but does not reflect the actual amounts the company would receive. Streaming income more accurately represents the money HYBE will receive for on-demand streams.
BTS’s revenue should come with relatively high margins, however. In 2024, HYBE set a record with revenue of $1.6 billion but saw its operating profit drop 40%. Breaking new artists is an expensive endeavor, and margins suffered as the company developed new acts to become more diversified and less reliant on its single-largest income source, BTS. Company executives said margins would improve once BTS returned to action in 2025, although it now appears that its income statement won’t show evidence of the group’s comeback until 2026.
Even though BTS’s return will be a huge financial windfall, HYBE is less reliant on the group than it was a few years ago. BTS’s share of HYBE’s revenue used to be as high as 95%, but with the group taking a break, dropped below 20% in 2024, the company said during its Feb. 21 earnings call. In recent years, HYBE acquired companies such as Big Machine and Quality Control and developed younger acts like ENHYPEN, Tomorrow X Together and aespa. Global diversity — HYBE Latin America’s boy band, for example — should produce results further down the road. Of course, once BTS’s billion-dollar comeback is in full swing, it’s sure to command a larger share of HYBE’s business.
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