Map of the Soul: the album left without its own tour

In early 2020, BTS was gearing up for what was supposed to be their biggest tour yet. After the stadium tour Love Yourself: Speak Yourself, the plan was to go a step further and take Map of the Soul: 7 to audiences at major stadiums and domes around the world. The tour was announced in January, the album came out in February, rehearsals were underway, and the first concert was set for Seoul on April 11. A few weeks later, it became clear none of it would go according to that plan.

The original announcement covered 37 shows in 17 cities, with room to add more dates. Four nights were booked at Seoul Olympic Stadium, after which BTS was set to head to North America. The schedule included Levi's Stadium, the Rose Bowl, the Cotton Bowl, Camping World Stadium, MetLife Stadium, FedExField, Rogers Centre, and Soldier Field. The European leg included London, Berlin, and Barcelona, with Rotterdam added later. A large Japanese leg followed too, with shows in Fukuoka, Osaka, Saitama, and Tokyo. It was the schedule of a group that, after Wembley, the Rose Bowl, and the Stade de France, was no longer coming back to small venues.

The opening in Seoul was supposed to be especially big. Big Hit expected around 200,000 attendees across the four Olympic Stadium shows, with international production companies and crews from multiple countries involved in the preparations. In late February, the coronavirus situation in South Korea suddenly worsened, and those very shows were the first to be canceled. Big Hit announced the decision on February 28, more than a month before the planned start, to avoid a last-minute cancellation for fans who had already planned trips and for the large number of people involved in the production.

At that point it still wasn't clear the entire tour would disappear. As the pandemic spread, plans for the other cities kept being pushed back, and by late April Big Hit announced the whole schedule would need to be reorganized. The tour still hadn't been officially canceled at that point. The idea was to move it until it was safe to travel and hold large concerts again, but nobody could say when that might be.

For BTS, that meant the album built for a major tour was left without the concert stage it was made for. Map of the Soul: 7 gave us songs like ON, Black Swan, Filter, My Time, Moon, Inner Child, UGH!, and Respect. We later saw many of them on stage in other formats, but audiences never got the original Map of the Soul Tour the way it was planned.

Throughout 2020, the members repeatedly talked about how much the whole situation affected them. RM admitted that at first they felt anger and helplessness, because everything was happening completely outside their control. SUGA talked about how, through their online performances, they realized all over again how much they missed the stage and a live audience. The problem wasn't just that they'd lost a run of concerts. An album they'd spent a long time working on came out at the exact moment they couldn't present it to fans the way they'd spent months preparing to.

So BTS started looking for other ways to perform. In June, they held Bang Bang Con: The Live, watched by 756,000 viewers from more than a hundred countries and regions. In October came Map of the Soul ON:E, a much bigger online production that drew nearly a million viewers from 191 countries and territories over two nights. ON:E finally brought at least some of the album's songs to a stage, but without an audience in front of the members. The concert was originally supposed to include a limited number of in-person viewers too, but that plan was also dropped due to the health restrictions at the time.

Months passed, and the tour was still formally just postponed. The final decision came in August 2021. BIGHIT MUSIC announced at the time that they'd been trying to find a way to continue the Map of the Soul Tour, but that given how circumstances had changed, it was no longer possible to hold the tour at its originally planned scale and schedule. After roughly a year and a half of waiting, the tour was officially canceled.

BTS returned to a live audience a few months later with Permission to Dance on Stage. The concerts in Los Angeles in late 2021 were their first major shows in front of a crowd after a long break, but no one tried to revive the Map of the Soul Tour again. In the meantime, Dynamite, BE, Butter, and Permission to Dance had all come out, and the group had moved into a different musical era.

Because of all that, the Map of the Soul Tour remains an odd gap in BTS's concert history. We know the cities, the stadiums, and the dates, we know they spent months preparing the performances, and we've seen part of what they'd built later, through ON:E. What we've never seen is the full tour all of it was originally made for.