Stray Kids Score Multiple New Bestsellers — But Will The Band's New Project Chart?

Forbes

21-03-2025

Stray Kids's Mixtape: Dominate tracks climb the iTunes chart individually, with four songs landing ... More in the top 50 just hours after release. NEW YORK, NEW YORK - MAY 06: (L-R) Bang Chan, Han, Felix, Seungmin, Hyunjin, I.N, Lee Know, and Changbin of Stray Kids attend The 2024 Met Gala Celebrating "Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion" at The Metropolitan Museum of Art on May 06, 2024 in New York City. (Photo by Kevin Mazur/MG24/Getty Images for The Met Museum/Vogue)
Stray Kids just delivered a new project, but it's not quite a full-length, nor is it a traditional single. The South Korean superstars shared Mixtape: Dominate on Friday (March 21), and while the title is being pushed as a 'single album' in the boy band's home country of South Korea, it's long enough to qualify as an EP in the U.S. – at least on most platforms. Whether Billboard will recognize it as such remains to be seen, but fans are already responding, and not just to the collection as a whole, but to the songs featured on its tracklist individually.
In its first hours of availability, every track featured on Mixtape: Dominate manages to reach the U.S. iTunes chart, which ranks the bestselling tunes in America on that one site. The brief project includes just five tunes, and all of them are selling well.
Three cuts — "Escape" (No. 34), "Truman" (No. 37), and "Cinema" (No. 38) — have all broken into the top 40. That placement is generally accepted as the cutoff point when determining whether a song is a real hit on the platform, so these placements hint at early success.
Just a few spots behind that trio of new bestsellers sits "Burnin' Tires," which launches at No. 44. The lowest-ranking of the five cuts, the Korean-language version of "Giant," opens at No. 76, placing it outside the higher tiers – but it's still selling fairly well.
Unlike many of the group's efforts, Mixtape: Dominate specifically shines a spotlight on the individual members of Stray Kids. While all the five songs are officially credited to the band as a whole, each track is also associated with specific artists from within the group, as their names are listed in parentheses.
"Escape" belongs to Bang Chan and Hyunjin. "Truman" is credited to Han and Felix, while "Cinema" goes to Lee Know and Seungmin. "Burnin' Tires" features only two members, Changbin and I.N. Only the Korean rendition of "Giant" is just a group effort.
While fans are quickly buying the individual songs, Mixtape: Dominate hasn't yet cracked the iTunes albums chart in the U.S. That's not entirely surprising, given the format. In South Korea, single albums are often shorter than typical EPs, and they chart as albums.
The distinction between an EP and a single album can be enough to disqualify them from U.S. charts, but Mixtape: Dominate may just be long enough to find space on rankings like the Top Album Sales roster or even the Billboard 200, depending on a handful of factors.