Who else but BTS could break a BTS record?
With their latest English-language single “Butter,” the Korean supergroup shattered their own record for most YouTube views in the first 24-hours of release on Friday, reaching nearly 113 million views by midnight ET, according to the platform’s public views tracker.
The previous record was set by BTS’s 2020 single “Dynamite,” their first entirely in English. According to official YouTube figures, the video received 101.1 million views in the first 24 hours, despite having 98.3 million public views.
The summer dance-pop jam “Butter” by BTS was launched on YouTube on Thursday, May 21, at 12AM ET/1PM KST, and has been pushed to new heights by the group’s devoted followers, ARMY.
With over 3.9 million combined viewers, the album set a new all-time record for the largest YouTube music video premiere and debuted at No. 1 on the U.S. iTunes chart within two hours of its release.
The video had been viewed over 116 million times by 1 a.m. ET Saturday.
BTS has previously set several 24-hour views milestones, such as for “Boy With Luv” featuring Halsey in April 2019, which received 74.6 million views on the first day.
The band announced at a press conference in Seoul on Friday that their first performance of “Butter” will be at the upcoming Billboard Music Awards on Sunday, May 23. They were nominated for four awards this year, the most in a single year, in the following categories: Top Duo/Group, Top Social Artist (for the fifth year in a row), Top Song Sales Artist, and Top Selling Song (for “Dynamite”).
Speaking of the upcoming broadcast, Suga acknowledged on Friday that “the first appearance of a song still makes you nervous.”
“Of course, the Billboard Awards are a very relevant, interesting, and meaningful stage for us,” he said.
Jungkook stated that the event would be significant for the band.
“Of course, the fact that we were nominated in four categories is not straightforward. It’s a tremendous honour,” he added. “It’s been a year since ‘Dynamite,’ and I think this reveals that the album is really loved by a lot of people, which makes us really happy.”
