SEOUL, April 22 — K-pop boy band BTS has scored its third No. 1 on the main Billboard 200 album chart, becoming the first group since the Beatles to earn the No. 1 spot three times in less than a year, Yonhap news agency, quoted Billboard.

Map of the Soul: Persona, BTS's latest seven-track album released April 12, debuted atop the Billboard 200 for the week of April 27, after earning 230,000 equivalent album units in the United States, the online music magazine said yesterday (US time), citing data from Nielsen Music.

It was the band's "career-best week,” it said.

The Billboard 200 and other charts will be fully updated on the Billboard website tomorrow.

Persona, the opener of the new BTS album series "Map of the Soul,” is the band's third Billboard No. 1 album in nearly 11 months. The band took its first No. 1 with Love Yourself: Tear in June last year before the following album Love Yourself: Answer again conquered the chart in September.

"Before BTS, the last traditional group (excluding the Glee ensemble, whose multiple cast members rotated) to log three leaders within such a quick span was the Beatles in 1995-96, when the band's archival releases Anthology 1, Anthology 2 and Anthology 3 all debuted at No. 1 in a stretch of 11 months and a week,” it said.

The Korean language-recorded Persona is also the fourth non-English album ever to top the prominent album chart in the course of the past year, according to Billboard. The aforementioned Love Yourself albums are two of the other three records that previously led the chart over the past year. — Bernama