On January 8, ITZY released the title track music video for “UNTOUCHABLE” from their new album, BORN TO BE.
Leading up to their album release, the girl group dropped multiple other music videos, including for the pre-release songs “BORN TO BE” and “Mr. Vampire” as well as the four solo songs from the album. This means, in total, they produced seven music videos for this comeback!
Given that ITZY’s last couple of comebacks — namely “Cake” and “Sneakers” — drew heavily mixed reactions from fans, it seems that JYP Entertainment has made a huge effort to really push and promote the girl group’s newest comeback with all of these music videos. The concept for BORN TO BE seems to be more similar to their earlier releases as a group, too, which is what a lot of fans have been wanting to see ITZY return to.
However, netizens have noticed that the views for “UNTOUCHABLE” as well as their other music videos released for this comeback seem to be unusually low compared to previous releases. In the first 24 hours, “UNTOUCHABLE” didn’t even reach 3 million views, and even now is barely over that number.
“Mr. Vampire” and “BORN TO BE”, released a week and three weeks ago respectively, have higher numbers, but are still somewhat low compared to how their MVs have performed in the past.
The topic of ITZY’s “low” music video views was brought up on a Reddit post, with the author questioning why this is happening.
The most popular theory among fans seems to be that JYP Entertainment just isn’t using ads to promote ITZY’s comeback as much as they have in the past. This means that only the “organic” views from people actively searching for the music video are being counted, and are understandably lower than “inorganic” views from advertising (which count as views when played on other videos).
Other commenters shared multiple reasons why this comeback may be getting less momentum than previous ones, from ITZY being an “older” group to Lia‘s hiatus.
Others actually blame the excessive promotions and music video releases leading up to the album actually coming out, which could have killed some of the momentum for “UNTOUCHABLE”.
On a more positive side, though, this commenter saw the view count in an optimistic way!
Regardless of why ITZY’s views are lower than previous comebacks, they’re still far from unsuccessful, and BORN TO BE seems to be an album that many fans are enjoying.
