[Today’s K-pop] Blackpink Rose’s “On the Ground” video tops 200m views

The music video for “On the Ground,” the solo debut of Blackpink’s Rose, surpassed 200 million views on YouTube on Tuesday, announced label YG Entertainment on the same day.
 
It has been 123 days since the video’s release. It stormed past 100 million views in about a week, the shortest time for a video by a K-pop solo female artist. The song topped iTunes top songs chart in 51 regions and topped both of Billboard’s worldwide tallies, the Global 200 and Billboard Global Excl. US. This made the songstress the first musician to hit No. 1 on the latter both solo and with a group, as Blackpink’s “Lovesick Girls” topped the chart in 2020.
 
Blackpink has a total of 29 videos with over 100 million views on YouTube and its channel on the platform has 63 million subscribers, bested only by Justin Bieber among musicians.

BTS’ Jin promises fans live chat with RM

Jin of BTS promised fans that he will host a live chat alongside RM within a month during an unboxing livestream.
 
In a video in which the bandmates split into two groups and unboxed two different versions of two-track release “Butter,” Jin shared tidbits behind making the poster and the jacket album.
 
“I loved the heart-shaped sunglasses and took three,” confided the artist, unfolding the page to show the picture taken on a sun lounger on the beach.
 
He decorated the album with stickers from the album and drew butterfly wings around the album title, before changing the wings into splashing water inspired by the car washing scene. The donut-shaped sticker, on a laptop or a notebook, would be a signal only recognized among their fans, he said knowingly.
 
Jin also told viewers how each of the bandmates went through changes in hair color and style, boasting that he is the most interesting of the members, and sang the chorus from the band’s new song “Permission to Dance” before the video came to an end.

BoA obtains 6,000 SM Entertainment stocks 

BoA exercised her stock options and obtained 6,000 additional stocks of her label SM Entertainment on Friday, according to a report from the Financial Supervisory Service on Tuesday.
 
She now owns 8,153 stocks and her stake in the company rose to 0.03 percent from 0.01 percent. With the transaction, she earned 140 million won ($122,300) based on the stock price. Meanwhile, SM Entertainment’s stock price hit a 52-week high Tuesday.
 
BoA has been an unregistered director of the company since 2014, along with Kang Ta from H.O.T.
 
“The two will participate in planning for diverse content and new businesses as creative directors, putting their know-how and capacity they have built up through global activities to new use,” said the firm at the time.
 
She will appear as one of the judges for a competition show among female dancers that is to start airing next month.

CIX to return with 1st LP

CIX signaled with a video snippet Tuesday that it will put out its first studio album.
 
In the short clip, a black cat sits alone on the grass near the ocean, and as the sun sets it heads somewhere and seems to arrive at a mysterious island.
 
The 2-year-old band completed its “Hello” series with its fourth EP “Hello Chapter 0. ‘Hello, Strange Dream’” in February. As it wrapped up the promotion for the EP, it said that it has already planned out the lead tracks for the albums to come out in summer and winter.
 
It also released “Tesseract (Prod. Hui, Minit)” earlier this month via K-pop entertainment platform Universe. The bandmates are currently starring in their original reality show “The CIX Million Dollar Kids,” inspired by 1970s TV series “The Six Million Dollar Man.”  

By Hwang You-mee (glamazon@heraldcorp.com)