« Billboard Pro : Why K-Pop Fans Still Buy CDs (Even When They Canโt Play Them) »
Monday, March 16, 2020 at 9:46PM | DFSB Kollective 
BTS Courtesy of Big Hit Entertainment In one of the last markets where physical sales of music remain strong, K-pop album packaging relies on sumptuous photography, elaborate graphic design and variant covers to sell CDs.
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But U.S. artists offering special physical editions of their albums is not nearly as widespread a practice as it is in the K-pop world. And fans of these American acts are more apt to stream the music than buy a CD or vinyl album, let alone hundreds of them.
“To the fans, it’s not just an issue of buying music,” says Bernie Cho, the head of DFSB Kollective, a Korean music export agency. “You’re showing your loyalty.” And that loyalty helps an album chart higher.
Though the use of concert ticket/album bundles to boost an album’s chart performance is rare in the Asian market, it does occasionally happen when K-pop albums are marketed stateside. (Billboard requires that the price of an album be at least $3.49 for it to be counted toward chart position.) Last year, SuperM released eight variants of its debut EP, The 1st Mini Album, and offered more than 60 merchandise/album bundles and a concert ticket/album sale redemption offer for the group’s North American tour. In 2018, BTS released four editions of Love Yourself: Answer and marketed a concert ticket/album sale redemption offer for the group’s sold-out October show at Citi Field in Flushing, N.Y. Both albums debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200.
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Lee predicts that the CD itself may one day entirely disappear as streaming makes further inroads. If that happens, she sees K-pop albums giving way to what she calls a “concept book” that forgoes a CD for other promotional and collectible content.
As long as fan demand continues, physical copies of K-pop albums won’t be phased out anytime soon. “It has to do with good old-fashioned moneymaking,” says DFSB’s Cho. “The margins on physical CDs have been and will continue to be very healthy.”
https://www.billboard.com/pro
By Tamar Herman
Featured Commentator : Bernie Cho [DFSB Kollective]