BABYMONSTER's third mini album CHOOM has become the fastest 2026 K-pop music video to cross 100 million YouTube views, hitting the milestone just 13 days and 21 hours after release. The four-track EP topped global YouTube trending charts and pushed first-week sales past 750,000 copies, cementing the YG septet's transition from rookies to commercial heavyweights as their CHOOM world tour gears up for a Seoul launch in June.
What Happened
YG Entertainment confirmed the 100-million-view milestone on May 18, 2026, at approximately 2:50 p.m. KST, with the CHOOM music video crossing the line in 13 days and 21 hours after its May 4 release. According to Soompi, the count makes the song the second K-pop release of 2026 to reach the mark — and the fastest. It is also BABYMONSTER's eleventh official music video to hit nine figures, a tally that for a group that only debuted in 2024 underlines how aggressively their YouTube audience has scaled.
The mini album itself carries four tracks — "MOON," title track "CHOOM," "I LIKE IT," and "LOCKED IN" — and clocks in at roughly twelve minutes. Hanteo Chart logged 387,871 copies sold on day one, and first-week sales surpassed 750,000 according to Soompi's tally. The album cycle proceeds without member Rami, who remains on a health-related hiatus; six members — RUKA, ASA, PHARITA, AHYEON, RORA, and CHIQUITA — handled the recording, choreography, and promotional schedule.
"CHOOM," the Korean word for "dance," works as both a title and a thesis. The lead track is a percussive, dance-forward cut built around chant hooks and tight harmonized refrains, and YG paired the release with a high-saturation visual concept that leans into stage formations rather than narrative video storytelling. The music video climbed to No. 1 on YouTube's worldwide trending chart within hours and entered the platform's most-viewed-in-24-hours ranking, giving the campaign the kind of first-day momentum that K-pop labels increasingly use as a benchmark.
Why It Matters
For YG Entertainment, the CHOOM rollout matters because BABYMONSTER is now the agency's most active commercial property and a primary driver of its 2026 release calendar. The label spent much of 2023 and 2024 staging a slow rollout — pre-debut singles, a partial-lineup debut as a five-piece, and a measured shift to seven members — before the group's full-length Drip in late 2024 began converting curiosity into chart performance. CHOOM is the moment the project crosses into mainstream blockbuster territory, with the kind of opening-week numbers usually reserved for fourth- or fifth-generation veterans.
The release also lands inside what the Korean music press is now openly calling the "May 2026 girl group comeback war." Within the same window, NMIXX dropped Heavy Serenade on May 11, LE SSERAFIM is set to release PUREFLOW pt. 1 on May 22, and aespa returns with the full album LEMONADE on May 29. That BABYMONSTER managed to seize the top-of-the-cycle 100-million milestone — and the first-week chart conversation — against that field gives YG a rare moment of clean narrative momentum in a category where SM, HYBE, and JYP have dominated the past two years.
From a business-model standpoint, the CHOOM numbers also confirm a structural shift inside K-pop: short, four-track mini-albums anchored around one global-trending visual are now competing head-to-head with full-length releases on first-week metrics. The four-track EP outperformed first-week expectations the trade press had set a month earlier, and YG's choice to schedule the world tour announcement on top of the release further fuses the recorded-music and live-touring product into one campaign rather than two sequential ones.
Reaction
Reception across reviewers and fan communities has been polarized in a way that itself signals how much the album matters. Positive reviews — from outlets including Artistrack and HIVE — read "CHOOM" as the moment YG's "swag" template finally clicks with this particular lineup, framing the group as the rightful inheritors of the agency's house style. Korea Portal, meanwhile, ran a more skeptical take, arguing that the track is BABYMONSTER's "most generically accomplished" title song to date and that the trade-off for chart-friendliness is a loss of the rougher, more idiosyncratic edges that defined the early Sheesh and Drip era.
Fan response on Weverse and X has skewed dramatically positive, driven in part by the live performance footage that has rolled out alongside the studio cut. Stage clips from pre-release showcases pulled millions of views inside 24 hours, and short-form choreography snippets — particularly the chorus point — have seeded an organic dance-cover trend on TikTok and Shorts. According to allkpop, the music video also held the No. 1 slot on YouTube's global music chart for three consecutive days in the week after release, a placement usually only achieved by the genre's biggest headline acts.
Industry watchers have flagged one further data point: physical-album buyers in Japan and Southeast Asia accounted for an unusually large share of first-week shipments, reflecting the group's multinational lineup — members hail from South Korea, Thailand, and Japan — and the deliberate Asia-Pacific framing of the upcoming tour. The Korea Herald's coverage of the milestone made specific note of how quickly the song crossed local-language fan thresholds in Indonesia and the Philippines, two markets that figure heavily in the tour routing.
What's Next
The release dovetails with the 2026–27 BABYMONSTER World Tour CHOOM, which YG has now expanded to 27 shows across 18 cities — a substantial step up from the group's first-tour Asia-only routing. The tour opens on June 26, 2026, at Jamsil Indoor Stadium in Seoul, before moving through Manila, Bangkok, Macau, Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur, Taipei, Hong Kong, and Singapore. Indonesia's date is locked in for October 17, 2026, and Oceania stops in Auckland, Melbourne, and Sydney will be the group's first-ever performances on that continent.
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YG has stated that more cities will be added in Europe, North America, and South America once the Asia–Oceania leg is fully announced, with the tour poster explicitly leaving slots for those regions. Industry analysts at Billboard and The Korea Herald expect the routing to mirror the pattern aespa just announced for its own SYNK tour: Latin America in late 2026, followed by a North American leg and a European run extending into early 2027. If that timeline holds, BABYMONSTER will be one of the few 2024-debuted groups to complete a true world circuit inside its first three years.
Beyond the tour, YG is expected to use the rest of 2026 to test BABYMONSTER's English-language footprint more aggressively. Sources close to the agency, quoted by allkpop, have hinted at a Japanese-language EP scheduled for the fall and at the group's first standalone festival headline slot in Southeast Asia. The performance of the November and December dates in particular will function as a stress test for YG's long-term thesis that BABYMONSTER can outgrow the regional-tier ceiling the agency historically struggled to break with its previous girl-group rosters.
Closing Thoughts
BABYMONSTER's CHOOM moment is, in some ways, the cleanest summary of where K-pop sits in 2026: short-form-friendly hooks, six-member choreography built for ten-second loops, and a world tour announcement engineered to ride the chart cycle rather than follow it. The group has not necessarily delivered the most artistically ambitious title track of the year — that critique from reviewers is real and worth taking seriously — but they have delivered the most ruthlessly efficient one, and the numbers say the market has rewarded that choice without ambiguity.
What is more interesting is the longer-term question the album raises about YG's own house style. The agency spent the late 2010s and early 2020s pivoting away from its older "swag" template, only to find that the same template, refitted around a younger, more international lineup, still scales. CHOOM is less a reinvention than a confirmation: the YG sound, when given a group with the choreographic discipline to land it, still travels. Whether that confirmation translates into long-term dominance or simply a strong second album cycle is the question the rest of 2026 will answer.
For now, though, the data is hard to argue with. A four-track mini, a hundred million views in under two weeks, a 27-show world tour, and a fan base distributed across three continents — that is not a rookie album. That is a flagship one, and it lands at a moment when K-pop's flagship category is more crowded than it has ever been.
한글 요약
YG 엔터테인먼트의 베이비몬스터가 세 번째 미니앨범 CHOOM 타이틀곡 뮤직비디오로 13일 21시간 만에 유튜브 1억 뷰를 돌파하며, 2026년 발매된 케이팝 뮤직비디오 가운데 가장 빠른 기록을 세웠다. 4트랙 미니앨범은 첫날 한터 기준 38만 7,871장이 팔렸고, 첫 주 판매량은 75만 장을 넘어섰다. 라미를 제외한 6인 체제로 진행된 이번 컴백은 데뷔 약 2년 만에 그룹을 본격적인 플래그십 라인업으로 끌어올렸다는 평가를 받는다.
같은 5월에는 엔믹스, 르세라핌, 에스파의 컴백이 잇따라 예정되어 있어 "걸그룹 컴백 대전"으로 불리는 가운데, 베이비몬스터가 사이클 초반의 1억 뷰 마일스톤을 선점한 점이 업계에서 가장 큰 화두로 떠올랐다. 평론가들은 트랙이 YG 특유의 "스웩" 공식을 가장 깔끔하게 정제한 결과물이라고 평가하면서도, 동시에 가장 평범한 타이틀이라는 비판도 함께 내놓았다. 다만 차트와 판매량, 유튜브 트렌딩 1위 지속 일수 모두 시장이 이 선택에 명확히 보상하고 있음을 보여준다.
다음 단계는 2026년 6월 26일 잠실실내체육관에서 시작되는 CHOOM 월드 투어로, 18개 도시 27회 공연이 확정됐다. 마닐라·방콕·마카오·자카르타·쿠알라룸푸르·타이베이·홍콩·싱가포르를 포함한 아시아 일정과 오클랜드·멜버른·시드니의 첫 오세아니아 공연이 발표됐고, 유럽·북미·남미 일정은 추후 공개 예정이다. 일본어 EP와 동남아 첫 단독 헤드라이너 페스티벌 출연도 가을 시즌 변수로 거론된다.
참고 / 출처: Soompi, The Korea Herald, allkpop, Soompi (CHOOM World Tour).