Stray Kids’ 3.28 Million Week Makes Nine-for-Nine Look Inevitable
THIS & THAT sold 3,289,269 copies on Hanteo and is tracking toward Stray Kids’ ninth straight Billboard 200 No. 1, with the group’s biggest U.S. week yet.
Mina Park
Stray Kids are about to go nine-for-nine on the Billboard 200, and somehow that is no longer the startling number.
The eight-member JYP Entertainment group sold 3,289,269 copies of THIS & THAT during its first seven days on Hanteo Chart. In the United States, Hits Daily Double’s final industry tally puts the mini album at roughly 362,000 equivalent units, including 351,000 album sales, for the tracking week that ended Thursday.
Billboard’s official numbers are due Sunday and may shift. The position is not expected to: THIS & THAT is headed for No. 1 on the Billboard 200, which would make Stray Kids the first act in the chart’s history to send each of its first nine entries straight to the top.
That extends a record they already own. The sales jump explains why this comeback feels bigger than a victory lap.
The career high came from an eight-track EP
Last year’s full album KARMA opened with 313,000 U.S. equivalent units, then the five-track DO IT followed with 295,000. Billboard measured 296,000 album sales for KARMA and 286,000 for DO IT.
If the industry tally holds close to Billboard’s final count, THIS & THAT will clear the group’s previous U.S. high by nearly 50,000 units. It did that with eight tracks, three fewer than KARMA, and a title song that trades the group’s usual maximalist impact for a loose, groovy hip-hop hook.
The Korean number moved the same way. Hanteo’s 3.28 million first-week total topped KARMA’s roughly 3.04 million and gave Stray Kids a fourth release above three million first-week copies. Circle Chart, which measures shipments through a different system, logged more than 3.47 million copies across the main, FANS, and LP editions during the album’s opening chart week.
Hanteo tracks purchases while Circle tracks shipments, so the totals cannot be lined up copy for copy. Both moved up. The physical audience did not plateau after eight No. 1 albums.
What 351,000 U.S. sales actually measure
About 97 percent of Hits Daily Double’s projected U.S. units came from album sales rather than streaming or individual track purchases. That split tells you what kind of pop power Stray Kids have built.
Open a standard Target edition and the strategy is sitting between the CD and photobook: a random member photocard, one of four unit cards, an ID card, postcards, stickers, and a retailer-exclusive card. Other editions change the package again.
Variants are now the modern pop playbook, from Taylor Swift to Linkin Park, and K-pop helped teach the wider industry how to make the album feel personal again. Stray Kids and Republic Records are especially good at turning a release into a shelf object worth collecting twice.
The fan work is real, and so is the purchase. Still, this No. 1 measures an exceptionally strong album-buying community, not equal dominance across every format.
There are signs that the base is widening beyond comeback week. JYP’s latest earnings report puts Stray Kids’ catalog shipments at 420,000 copies in the second quarter, up from 120,000 a year earlier. New buyers are reaching backward, not only grabbing the newest photocard.
The packaging works because the record sounds like them
3RACHA, the in-house unit of Bang Chan, Changbin, and Han, worked across all eight songs. The same members looking out from the photobook are shaping the record, which keeps the collecting ritual tied to a sound fans recognize.
Photocards can persuade a fan to buy twice. The music has to make the next comeback feel worth showing up for.
The title track’s restraint helps. “This & That” leaves more open space than “S-Class” or “Chk Chk Boom,” while “RUN IT” supplies the stadium-sized release. One gives a casual listener an easy hook; the other gives the concert crowd its next brass hit.
The live calendar starts testing that bridge again on August 29 and 30, when the RUN IT tour reaches Tokyo’s MUFG Stadium. Five Seoul concerts were already sold out before the album arrived.
Our read: Sunday’s ninth No. 1 will extend a record Stray Kids already owned. Adding buyers after four years at the summit is harder, and giving them a self-produced record built for the rooms they are filling is smarter.
The streak has become predictable. Growth has not.
