2016: The Most Beautiful Moment in Life: Young Forever, Youth and Wings
BTS released their sixth Japanese single, "Run", on March 15. On May 2, they released a special compilation album, The Most Beautiful Moment in Life: Young Forever; they held two days of concerts at the Olympic Gymnastics Arena in Seoul from May 7–8 in support of their albums. A total of 24,000 fans attended. After that, the group began their Asia tour, which sold out 144,000 concert tickets. The group also headlined KCON in both Los Angelesand New York in June and July 2016, both to sold out audiences.
On September 7, 2016, they released their second Japanese studio album Youth, selling over 44,000 copies in its first day of release, and shot up to first place on the daily albums chart in Japan.
On October 10, 2016, BTS released their second full-length studio album, Wings, with the title track "Blood Sweat & Tears". Pre-orders for the album, which contains 15 tracks, started on September 28, and reached over 500,000 copies within the first week. The group achieved an "all-kill" on the South Korean music charts Within 24 hours of the music video for "Blood Sweat & Tears" being released, it reached over 6 million views. This broke the previous record on YouTube for the highest number of views on a K-pop
group music video within 24 hours. The album managed to make it to the U.K. Official Albums Charts, making history as the first Korean act to do so.The album also debuted at #26 on the Billboard 200 chart with 16,000 units earned in the week ending October 13. This made the new U.S. record for "Highest Charting and Best Selling K-pop Album", with 2NE1's Crush previously holding the record at #61 in 2014. It also marked them as the first K-pop act to log three entries on the Billboard 200. A few days later, it was revealed that BTS had topped the World Albums Chart, World Digital Songs Chart and Social 50 Chart for week of October 29. They also charted on YouTube Music Global Top 100 – 17th on the video chart, 6th on the artist chart and 14th on the tracks chart.
From November 12–13, BTS held a large scale fan meeting at Gocheok Sky Dome. All 38,000 tickets were sold out.
On November 19, 2016, BTS announced the new Live Trilogy Episode III: The Wings Tour. The tour is set to visit South Korea, Chile, Brazil, the United States, Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines, Hong Kong and Australia. On the same day, BTS won "Album of the Year" with The Most Beautiful Moment in Life: Young Forever at the Melon Music Awards. This award marked BTS's first daesang, or grand prize, since debut.On December 2, 2016, BTS won their second daesang for "Artist of the Year" at the 2016 Mnet Asian Music Awards. By doing this, BTS became the first artist not from a "Big 3" entertainment company (S.M., YG and JYP) to win the award.
Background
Earlier in September, the group announced their comeback with a prologue trailer, featuring a new track called "Butterfly". They also announced a domestic concert from November 27 to 29, The Most Beautiful Moment in Life: On Stage, where they would unveil their new single. The news of the upcoming album made #화양연화 trend and rank first in trending topics worldwide on Twitter. On November 17, BTS released an animated comeback trailer featuring "Nevermind", another track featuring member Suga's rap from the album. The video showed clips of a boy playing basketball and later chasing a butterfly. Five days later, BTS revealed concept images labeled with a bottom caption: "Je Ne Regrette Rien", which means "I regret nothing" in French; a second set was revealed with the captions, "Papillion", which means "butterfly". A music video teaser was released on the 24th, revealing the name of the new single, "Run".
At the press conference for their concert, BTS explained the concept of their album. They stated: "Part one explained how youth is tiring and difficult, and it also touched on how we feel like we're always on edge. Part two will have a more adventurous and daring feel to it. That's why our title song is 'Run'." Rap Monster added: "We didn't want to just blankly say 'cheer up' or 'be strong'. We really wanted to comfort people our way, by producing the music and writing the lyrics ourselves. We poured our heart and soul into this amazing song".
During their concert tour in support for their album, Rap Monster explained that "Run"'s "B" part, with the lyrics, "make me run more", was not working out during the song-writing process. A melody was suggested by Jungkook but was later rejected as it was deemed "too good that...other parts could not stand out that much". For the final composition, V's melody was ultimately used with Jungkook's original lyrics.
