Fans Confused Over Billboard Apparently Determining BLACKPINK’s “Born Pink” To Be An English Album

Each week, Billboard updates its World Albums chart to show which 15 international albums — those not considered English/American releases — are currently the top trending in terms of sales, streams, and other criteria.

Because of K-Pop’s growing influence in the music industry worldwide, it’s not uncommon at all to see new albums in the music genre make it onto the World Albums chart regularly.

In fact, this week, NCT 127‘s newest album, 2 Baddies, leaped onto the chart for the first time this week and ranked at #1. Along with this, other K-Pop albums that are on the chart this week and have been for previous weeks include Between 1&2 by TWICE, PROOF by BTS, and Manifesto: Day 1 by ENHYPEN.

The album that was oddly absent from the World Albums chart this week, however, was BLACKPINK‘s new album, Born Pink.

It’s certainly not because the album didn’t perform well enough to get on the chart, which has left fans extremely confused. After all, BLACKPINK is currently ranked #1 on the Artist 100 chart, and “Shut Down” and “Pink Venom” are currently ranked #1 and #2 respectively on the Billboard Global 200 chart.

It made some realize that, apparently, Billboard is considering Born Pink to be an English album, which would make it ineligible for the World Albums chart.

Out of the eight songs on the album, four of them — “Typa Girl”, “Hard To Love”, “The Happiest Girl” and “Tally” — are in the English language, which means that it’s not the majority, but rather half of the lyrics in Born Pink. This made some fans believe that maybe since Korean wasn’t the “dominant” language, that was what made it an “English” album by Billboard’s standards.

Bornpink, Blackpinks new album is classified as an English album from kpopthoughts

However, someone made the counterclaim that the album Chosen by the Italian rock band Måneskin was ranked at #4 on the World Albums chart at one point, despite the fact that six of its seven tracks are in English.

And as another further example, BLACKPINK’s own The Album also had three English songs along with “Ice Cream”, which was mostly in English, and it reached #1 on the Billboard World Albums chart. Fans suspect that maybe the total percentage of all the English lyrics in Born Pink outweigh those in The Album, but it’s just a theory at this point.

People just can’t seem to figure out the logic that Billboard is working with, and we don’t blame them!

Do you have any theories as to why Billboard made this decision? Some fans are hoping that it might mean BLACKPINK might have an easier time with American awards shows and other promotions because of it, but time will tell for sure!