K-pop boy band Stray Kids smashes records with five million-plus album pre-sales and more than two million copies sold on day one in South Korea.
On the day of its release, Stray Kids’ comeback album 5 Star quickly became one of the bestselling titles in South Korea this year. The album’s immediate commercial success has helped the boy band achieve a feat only accomplished by two other bands in the nation’s history.
5 Star was only released on Friday, June 2, and sold a staggering 2,392,666 copies that day in South Korea alone, according to the Hanteo chart, one of the two main music charts in the country. Meanwhile, the album has seen more than five million units sold in pre-sale — the highest recorded album pre-sale in history.
The group is only the third in history to sell over two million copies of an album on the first day of release in South Korea. Stray Kids joins BTS and Seventeen with a massive first-day win; BTS set a precedent with their album Map of the Soul: 7 in early 2020, with over 2.65 million copies in the first six hours of availability. BTS would achieve a second showing with Proof in 2022, which surpassed two million sales on its first day.
Fellow K-pop boy band Seventeen became the second group to sell more than two million copies of a new release in a single day earlier this year. Their FML release achieved a whopping 3.99 million copies sold on its first day, shattering the previous records for first-day sales and setting a new benchmark for first-week sales altogether.
Now, Stray Kids have surpassed their previous best first-week sales record and broke their own first-day sales record. The previous record of approximately 2.1 million copies sold in the first week was held by the group’s EP Maxident. That release sold 1.3 million copies on the day of its debut.
Stray Kids have sold over 9 million copies across all their albums on the Hanteo charts — making them the fifth artist to achieve this feat in South Korea.