ITZY's maknae Yuna dropped her "Ice Cream" album last week, making her the second member of the fivesome to have a solo after Yeji put out "AIR" last year. "Ice Cream" ended its first seven days with 101,777 sales, giving it a solid showing against other female idols' recent releases, landing in between MAMAMOO Moonbyul's "laundri" and TWICE Chaeyoung's "LIL FANTASY vol.1".
Did Yuna underperform?
Despite its competitiveness, "Ice Cream" trails behind ITZY Yeji's 220k units sold for "AIR". Why the difference? It might come down to a couple of things.
First is that the global economy is in an increasingly difficult position, meaning MIDZYs will have to be more careful with how they financially support ITZY and its members. The group just had a major comeback in November for "TUNNEL VISION", and are currently on the Asian leg of their third world tour. One could expect that spending on those two things would take priority over a member solo.
Secondly, there are indications that interest in Kpop as a genre has plateaued. This may make it harder for albums to sell as much as others did in years past.
There's also the fact that fans have a tendency to purchase fewer copies of a solo work versus their group as a whole. In writing this article, I compared a selection of four girl group's sales with some of their individual member's sales, and the former beat out the latter every single time (see Table 1). Thus it's presumable that "Ice Cream" wouldn't outsell, or even get near, the 387k copies garnered by "TUNNEL VISION".
| Girl group | Recent album | First week sales | Solo member | Recent album | First week sales | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| BLACKPINK | DEADLINE | 1774k | Jennie | Ruby | 661k | |
| Lisa | Alter Ego | 167k | ||||
| i-dle | We Are | 1063k | Miyeon | My, Lover | 201k | |
| Minnie | Her | 193k | ||||
| Red Velvet | Cosmic | 270k | Wendy | Cerulean Verge | 51k | |
| Joy | From Joy, with Love | 53k | ||||
| TWICE | This Is For | 609k | Tzuyu | Aboutzu | 331k | |
| Nayeon | Na | 376k |
Table 1. Select girl group albums in contrast to some of the group's member solo releases. For a better comparison, Japanese releases and special albums such as "TEN: The Story Goes On" were ignored.
Yuna doing about a quarter of ITZY's total is not out-of-line when looking at the table, where an individual's sales can range from 10% to 50% of their group's. So while she sold less than Yeji, its still pretty good in comparison to the rest of the industry.