NCT WISH's First-Half Sales Numbers Deserve More Attention Than They Got
NCT WISH's First-Half Sales Numbers Deserve More Attention Than They Got Photo: Shixart1985 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0) — illustrative image The loudest K-pop sales stories of 2026 have belonged to comeback titans — Stray Kids' ninth consecutive Billboard 200 No. 1, BIGBANG's 20th-anniversary return, BTS's five-month chart hold. Meanwhile, one of the year's genuinely remarkable commercial performances has been sitting quietly inside Circle Chart's official midyear list: NCT WISH's "Ode to Love" finished the first half of 2026 as the seventh best-selling album in all of K-pop. What the Midyear Data Shows Per Circle Chart's official first-half 2026 report, "Ode to Love" recorded 1,398,242 copies at No. 7 on the midyear album chart — accumulated across weekly counts since January, not a single release-week spike. And the main edition was not alone: the SMC version of the same album added another 517,288 copies at No. 27. Acr...