Stray Kids Reach No. 1 (Again) With CD Sales, Not Streams
An array of collectible CD packages sent the K-pop octet to the top of the Billboard 200, while new releases by Jelly Roll, Enhypen and Foo Fighters open in the Top 10.For 12 straight weeks recently, the country star Morgan Wallen dominated the Billboard album chart, but others are now breaking through. Last week, Taylor Swift returned to the top with deluxe versions of her latest album, “Midnights,” and this week the K-pop group Stray Kids scores its third No. 1 album in 15 months with “Five-Star.”A barrage of collectible CD releases — 18 in all — sent the eight-member Stray Kids to No. 1. “Five-Star,” with 12 tracks sung mostly in Korean, opens with the equivalent of 249,500 sales in the United States, 231,000 of those on CD, according to the tracking service Luminate.The album was also credited with nearly 20 million streams. To put that number in perspective, on last week’s singles chart Wallen had 33 million clicks for his No. 1 song “Last Night” — just one of the 36 tracks on his album, “One Thing at a Time,” which holds at No. 2 this week. (Swift’s “Midnights” falls four spots to No. 5.)The success of Wallen, Swift and Stray Kids is also notable in that all three share the same record label: Republic Records, a division of the giant Universal Music Group. Counting releases by those artists and another in February by the K-pop group Tomorrow X Together, Republic has now held the No. 1 spot for 15 of the 23 weeks of the year so far.A clutch of new releases are in the Top 10. In third place is “Whitsitt Chapel” by Jelly Roll, the face-tattooed rapper-turned-country singer who has become the toast of Nashville. Enhypen, another K-pop act, lands at No. 4 with “Dark Blood.”The soundtrack to “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse,” by the star hip-hop producer Metro Boomin — with guest appearances by Offset, ASAP Rocky, Future, Lil Uzi Vert, Lil Wayne, 21 Savage and many others — opens at No. 7. And Foo Fighters’ “But Here We Are,” the band’s first since the death of its drummer Taylor Hawkins last year, starts at No. 8. More
