Netizens clear up suspicions of BTS’ alleged ‘sajaegi’
Netizens have taken a closer look at official data to clarify the recent rumors of BTS sajaegi for their latest album.
Recently, accusations arose of the boy group engaging in sajaegi, or buying large quantities of albums to inflate sales numbers, after they beat BIGBANG in album sales.
However, fans took to official data to clarify these suspicions one by one.
One suspicion that arose is in regards to a sudden spike in sales over the weekend. However, according to Hanteo Chart, this is due to the fact that offline sales are entered into the system all at once manually. Also, sales from Japan have been slowly integrated into these figures. Hence, groups with large quantities of offline sales will often experience such a spike.
As for BTS, many purchased albums individually rather than in group orders as notice for the latter came too late. Additionally, the end of exams also marked a coincidental timing point for sales to increase.
A second suspicion compared the sales of BTS to veteran groups such as TVXQ, Super Junior, and BEAST. In comparing the figures, some doubted how a relatively young group like BTS could achieve such sales in comparison. It was then revealed that BTS’ sales were being compared to sales of repackaged albums by TVXQ and Super Junior which tend to have lower sales than initial album releases. Therefore, while BTS sold 4,700 albums in the first four days of sales, benchmarks of the veteran groups are 73,000 TVXQ albums and 64,000 Super Junior albums in their first weeks of sales.
Furthermore, the group had proven their popularity with various awards such as “Bonsang” at the Seoul Gayo Awards and the “World Rookie Award” at the Gaon Charts Awards, making their good album sales come as no surprise.
Thirdly and finally, the original poster disproved the suspicion that anyone is capable of sajaegi. As proven by Dispatch, Hanteo Chart does not record sales per barcode; sales are inputted only after proof of purchase such as tax invoices are cleared. Additionally, as Big Hit Entertainment stated earlier. a heavy financial investment is necessary to partake in sajaegi as record stores take substantial commission fees – the agency simply does not have the resources to commit to such an activity.
This detailed clarification led to positive and supporting messages from readers:
1. [+19, -1] (Long detailed description of how hard working the members of BTS are)… These kids are not greedy for money at all and work so hard for everything and you think they’d resort to this just to make money? Even if their agency did commit sajaegi, I bet the BTS members themselves would be mad and try to stop it ㅋㅋㅋ
2. [+13, -1] Thank you for explaining it so clearly ㅜㅜㅜ
3. [+12, -2] I hope people who are claiming sajaegi will read this..
4. [+8, -1] This needs to be read by everyone claiming BTS is committing sajaegi. How can we prove that it’s not sajaegi when sajaegi was never committed to begin with? If anything, everyone else should be the one coming in with proof trying to prove that it is sajaegi. All we’re doing is trying our best to give our kids their #1 ㅜㅜ
5. [+6, -0] This is fact. I hope whoever first claimed the sajaegi suspicions gets hit with a boomerang.
Source: Pann and Netizen Buzz
