1. Why is Stray Kids challenging a Billboard 200 #1 debut If they've never charted.
This is the first time Stray Kids has been receiveing a good and proper US distribution. Previously, their albums distributed for US fans used to be delayed for shipping weeks or even months after the release. What means, when their fans bought from these specific minor stories, It used to hurt their hanteo' achievements, so their fans avoid and bought through Korean stories.
When their albums started to be sold in stories such as Amazon, B&N and Target, It became the main focus of their US Fans and, through the whole month, they dominated Target, Barnes and Amazon's Top 5 of Best Sellers Chart.
Digital Album sales were never Stay's main focus, especially because when Stray Kids blew up in popularity in mid 2020, It wasn't even as significant as used to be, since iTunes is every new year more dead than the last one.
2. Pre-order Beneficits and how they work for Stray Kids
So, every pre-release of Stray Kids album, JYP announces different pobs for different stories and STAY buy them depending on their preference for what is offered. Since their albums started to being distributed in US Stores and for US fans, they created pre-order benefits to motivate these specific citzens to buy Stray Kids' albums.
3. Korean store Yes24 and what's their correlation with Billboard 200 for ODDINARY sales.
You can buy from Yes24 If you are from US, Germany, Mexico, Thailand, Korea, Brazil etc It doesn't matter. When they are being sold by JYP, the pre order benefit is a folder poster (If I'm not mistaken, but someone can correct me). However, Yes24 gives a opportunity for re-sellers to deliver albums from another country to Korea. In this specific case, the album was more than 3x the original price. So the re-seller buy in a US Store If there's a request, with a pre-order benefit from there and is selling to a regular korean. But If you check the actual index points of Yes24 for the album, It's 450. What is extremally low, so It doesn't have any impact in their sales. Both deals work separately.
Even Stray Kids own personal shop cancelled overseas orders.
I swear to you, If people from all around the world could be buying their albums there and counting towards Billboard, they would be with #1 guaraanted with a huge amount of sales, not fighting against another artist. That's how focused and organized Stays are to create and execute goals for Stray Kids.
Jeff Benjamin himself going in defense of them:
4. To end It, Stray Kids is simple becoming more popular.
It's not rocket science. This is being reflected in their streaming plataforms, the size of the arenas they will performing going to be bigger than in the first half of 2020, their sales through Korean stories, the improvement of their domestic charting. So why would be a surprise for It in the US that were always one of the countries with their strongest fandoms?
5. I appreaciate the amount of relevance people put in Stray Kids name to believe Billboard and HDD will be manipulated because of them.
I always say they are the biggest legendary pop act since the debut of Michael Jackson, but seeing people indirectly agreeing makes me happy.
