50,000 people, one balcony, $107.5 million impact: What BTS’s Mexico visit actually means

Con una hermosa sencillez BTS saludó a su “A.R.M.Y” y a cerca de 50 mil personas que se congregaron en el zócalo para saludarles. Me da mucha alegría haber podido darles este momento de júbilo. El grupo transmite en sus canciones mensajes positivos que fomentan una cultura de paz… pic.twitter.com/CS0dTOYqJ4

— Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo (@Claudiashein) May 7, 2026

That balcony is where the Mexican president stands on September 15 to mark the Independence Day. However, no international musical act had ever appeared there alongside a sitting president, making BTS the first one to do ever so.

An estimated 50,000 fans gathered below in the Zócalo, Mexico City’s main public square to see BTS (Photo: Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo / X)

To the crowd’s delight, RM addressed the crowd in Spanish. Sheinbaum presented the group with a commemorative plaque and told the gathered fans she had already asked them to return the following year.

This is BTS’s first visit to Mexico since performances in 2014, 2015, and 2017. Tickets for the three concerts at Estadio GNP Seguros on May 7, 9, and 10 sold out in under an hour, prompting resale prices to climb as high as $9,000. The ticket frenzy led Sheinbaum’s administration to direct Mexico’s Federal Consumer Protection Agency to demand transparency from promoter Ocesa and Ticketmaster Mexico after thousands of complaints from fans

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According to her statement, Sheinbaum had even written a formal letter to South Korean President Lee Jae Myung requesting additional BTS concerts in Mexico. The South Korean government responded three weeks later, saying it had forwarded the request to HYBE.

The numbers behind the visit

The Mexico City Chamber of Commerce estimated the three concerts would generate an economic impact of approximately $107.5 million, or around 155.7 billion Korean won.

As per the reports of Korean entertainment publication Naver, Mexico has more than 14 million K-pop fans on Spotify, making it the fifth-largest K-pop market in the world and the only Spanish-speaking country in the global top 10. K-pop streams in the country have grown by more than 500 percent over the last five years.

Within that market, BTS is the most-streamed K-pop artist. Their 2020 album Map of the Soul: 7 is the most-streamed K-pop album in Mexico, with eight of the top ten spots on the all-time K-pop albums chart occupied by BTS releases. Their 2020 hit “Dynamite” ranks as the most-streamed K-pop song in Mexico since the genre’s global rise

What comes next

After Mexico City, the ARIRANG World Tour continues through Latin America with stops in Bogotá, Lima, Buenos Aires, Santiago de Chile, and São Paulo, before heading to Europe for shows in Paris, London, and Madrid.