BTS Just Broke South Korea With a 250,000-Strong Comeback Show

A quarter of a million people flooded central Seoul on March 21 to welcome BTS back. The group's first full concert in three and a half years, 'The Comeback Live – Arirang,' turned Gwanghwamun Square into the largest public concert South Korea has ever seen — and it wasn't particularly close.

Only 22,000 fans held tickets for the designated seating area. The rest — somewhere between 104,000 and 250,000 more — packed surrounding streets and watched on massive video screens, turning entire city blocks into an open-air arena. The show also streamed live on Netflix in what was the platform's first-ever live music broadcast, a partnership that says a lot about where the industry thinks marquee events are heading.

"I still vividly remember asking you to wait for us at our last concert in Busan a few years ago. Thank you so much for coming here. Actually, I had so many worries before standing here today, but seeing you all again, I'm so grateful and happy," a member told NME during the event.

The concert served as a launchpad for 'Arirang,' BTS' first full-length album with all seven members in nearly four years, released just one day prior. The project features a wild range of collaborators — Tame Impala, JPEGMAFIA, Flume, and El Guincho among them — and eight of its tracks got their first live airings at the show, including 'Body to Body,' 'Aliens,' 'Normal,' and '2.0.' Fan favorites like 'Dynamite,' 'Butter,' and 'Mic Drop' rounded out the setlist. RM performed mostly seated due to an ankle injury, but it barely registered against the scale of everything else happening.

“0 is just getting started," the group declared, as NME reported.”

The numbers off-stage were just as massive. 'Arirang' nearly doubled Harry Styles' opening-day Spotify streams, locking in the year's biggest streaming debut and landing as the 12th-best opening day for any album in the platform's history. For a group that's been away since their October 2022 Busan show — held just before the members left to fulfill South Korea's mandatory military service — those figures confirm what everyone already suspected: ARMY didn't go anywhere.

"BTS 2.0 is just getting started," the group declared, as NME reported.

With the album rollout underway, a Netflix partnership in play, and a fanbase that just shut down a capital city, the obvious question is whether a world tour announcement is next. If Seoul was the opening statement, the rest of 2026 could get very loud.