K-Pop Group Stray Kids Debuts With No. 1 Album, as Charli XCX Also Bows in Top 10
variety.comChris Willman Music WriterThe South Korean group Stray Kids never impacted the Billboard 200 album chart in any position before, but the K-pop crew passed go and came in with a bang, landing at No.
1 with “Oddinary.”The vast majority of interest in the band came in the form of full albums sold, not streaming, which allowed “Oddinary” to stake a claim for the biggest week of 2022 so far in the sales department.
The overall total in album-equivalent units was 110,000, which is not a record for the year… but the fact that 103,000 of those units came via pure album sales did set a benchmark that hasn’t been reached by anyone else in ’22.Interestingly, Billboard reports that more than 100,000 of those 103,000 album sales were in CD form, with no vinyl edition available and not that much action on the digital download front — the seven different collectible packages proving an irresistible physical lure for fans, as is often the case with other K-pop groups like BTS.
Stray Kids have been around for a few years, but just not with any effort to impact the U.S. market till now. The group, a product of a 2017 reality show in South Korea, did have two previous releases that did well on the world music chart.
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