"Swim" Is Eight Weeks on the Hot 100. "Merry Go Round" Drops Tomorrow.
On Billboard's chart dated June 20, "Swim" sits at No. 43 on the Hot 100 - eight consecutive weeks on the chart for BTS's lead single from Arirang. The run makes "Swim" the group's longest-charting Hot 100 entry since "Butter" and "Permission to Dance" dominated the chart in 2021. Tomorrow, the music video for "Merry Go Round," the album's third single, goes live.
The sequencing is deliberate. "Swim" debuted with the album in March, peaked in the top 40, and has held position through the tour's opening legs in Korea and Japan. "Come Over" - released June 12, the morning of BTS's second Busan show and their 13th debut anniversary - entered the chart this week. "Merry Go Round" adds a third active single to the cycle just as the tour moves into Europe, with Madrid on June 26 and 27.
The pattern mirrors how the group managed the "Butter"/"Permission to Dance" era: staggered releases timed to tour legs, each single entering the chart with a performance moment already attached. "Come Over" had its world premiere at the Busan Day 2 show on June 13, in front of 55,000 fans, before the song had been out for 24 hours. "Merry Go Round" gets a music video. The Madrid crowd will likely know both before the stadium shows begin.
The broader chart picture holds. Arirang remains on the Billboard 200 in its fourteenth week, currently at No. 18 - a sustained run for a K-pop album without an English-language crossover single in the top ten. "Swim" has not cracked the top 10 on the Hot 100, peaking at No. 31 in week three. But eight weeks of consistent presence at No. 43 is a different metric: catalog engagement rather than viral spike. ARMY streaming patterns, combined with the tour's weekly news cycle, are sustaining the numbers in a way that pure release-week momentum doesn't.
The Madrid shows on June 26 and 27 at Estadio Santiago Bernabéu are the first European stops of the Arirang tour, and the first BTS concerts in Spain. "Merry Go Round" will have been out for roughly a week by then. Whether it charts above or below "Come Over" will be the first real indicator of how the mid-tour single strategy is calibrating against the European market.
