by According to a press release from the Korea Consumer Agency on March 7, only 5.7% of active K-pop fans have listened to music using CDs for the past two years. However, last year’s K-pop album sales exceeded 77 million, breaking another record.
Most of the entertainment industry is making it natural for consumers to purchase multiple albums to get the product they want by increasing the number of album versions to increase the sales volume of albums, ‘selling’ various goods and even providing goods at random.
The Korea Federation for Environmental Movements said, “Even though the purpose of purchasing a record is no longer the original product, ‘CD,’ the sales volume of albums is increasing.” We need to enact appropriate legislation to prevent this,” he said.
Album components, more than half ‘random.’
Finding albums containing only CDs can be challenging recently released K-pop albums.
It is common to include goods such as photo cards, posters, postcards, and stickers, and as a result of a survey of significant K-pop albums (50 types) released within the last two years by the Korea Consumer Agency, an average of 7.8 goods per album. contains
Among them, random goods have an average of 2.9 pieces, which can occupy more than a third of the components.
In the case of the album with the most types of photo cards, a total of 78 kinds of photo cards are provided, and six types are randomly included in one album, so you need to purchase at least 13 albums to collect all kinds of photo cards.
Buying CDs for goods. However, the goods information is ‘private.’
According to a survey by the Korea Consumer Agency, 52.7% of consumers active in the K-pop fandom answered that they had purchased albums to collect goods.
Currently, goods are the main purpose of purchasing a product, not an additional product.
However, the online purchase details page of the album under investigation only provides information on the type and quantity of the enclosed goods. Still, it needs to provide detailed information, such as product images.
This is contrary to the ‘whether or not to provide product information’ and ‘provision of essential information’ of the Electronic Commerce Act, which ‘regulates to provide information on transaction conditions such as product information that can affect purchases, and information and characteristics of goods by item.’
‘Record trash’ that is thrown away without goods.
According to the ‘Fandom Marketing Consumer Problem Survey’ announced in December of last year, close to 70% of fans who have been active for the past two years said that excessive music purchases have a negative impact on the environment.
Even now, it is easy to find countless abandoned albums with only photo cards and other goods obtained.
In addition, there are many cases where they are sent to childcare facilities or welfare centers under the name of donation.
Employees of some welfare centers even appealed to the welfare center to not delay disposing of the album waste any longer, saying that the piled-up record waste is already saturated.
Albums that are not in demand pile up in the center’s warehouse and take up a lot of space, and handling them also costs the center’s budget and workforce.
The Korea Federation for Environmental Movements said, “Most physical records, such as CDs and cases, are made of plastic, and their surfaces are coated, so recycling is difficult, resulting in a lot of waste.” It is being suggested as an alternative, but to fundamentally solve the problem, we need to change companies’ marketing strategy that induces overconsumption.”
The Korea Federation for Environmental Movement and the Community IT Social Cooperative plan to continue various activities to recognize and improve the seriousness of this K-pop record trash problem.
