BTS Ends Arirang's North America Leg With 1.92 Million Fans
BTS closed the North American leg of its Arirang world tour Sunday with roughly 1.92 million fans across 31 sold-out shows in 12 cities. The tour's final stop, four nights at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, drew about 282,000 people on its own and pushed the group's all-time attendance at the venue past any other act in stadium history.
According to BigHit Music, all 31 North American shows sold out in advance over the tour's five-month run, which opened in Tampa and closed with the September 1-2 and 5-6 SoFi dates. Counting BTS's four 2021 shows there for Permission to Dance on Stage, the group has now played SoFi eight times - more than any other act since the stadium opened in 2020 - for a combined 496,000 tickets sold across both runs.
The Los Angeles stop doubled as a civic send-off. The city proclaimed September 1-8 "BTS Week," and City Hall was lit red on opening night to match the cover art of the Arirang album. Members of the Los Angeles City Council and the city's tourism board attended a proclamation ceremony at City Hall the day before the run began. Around the stadium, local restaurants and shops in Koreatown ran BTS-tied promotions, and fans in the crowd wore hanbok and carried taegeuk fans through the concourse. J-Hope addressed the crowd from the stage on the tour's final night: "We were so happy, every moment seemed to have passed in an instant." All four shows streamed on Weverse to viewers in 177 countries.
The four-night stand was the tour's longest North American booking outside Las Vegas, a scheduling choice BigHit has not explained beyond citing ticket demand. It also gave the run a structure other stops didn't get: a birthday, a send-off, and a closing night, stacked into four consecutive shows rather than spread across a single stop.
The finale carried a second layer of timing. September 1 was Jungkook's birthday, and September 12 will be RM's; the stadium turned gold for "Golden" and blue for "Indigo" as fans sang along between songs, a detail BigHit built into the run rather than left to chance. The momentum showed up in individual numbers too - Jungkook's solo single "Still With You" passed 500 million streams on Spotify on Sunday, landing in the same 48 hours as the tour's close.
Arirang has not lost a single date to an empty seat since it opened in April. The tour's next stop is Bogotá on October 2, its first show in South America.
