Her birthday doesn't fall on a Wednesday this year, so it's quite unlikely

2024! :sheyhey

Time to start speculating!

this is a great idea!! it would incentivize people to buy the album + it would provide the fans with more pics from the album photoshoot

I agree that would be awesome. About time Jpop goes the Kpop route in that respect, maybe?

definitely, and not just jpop! i saw beyoncé released 4 deluxe boxsets for her new album Renaissance (fantastic record btw) that included a photo booklet, a poster, and a tshirt. those however were only available during the album preorder period. kinda reminds me of how JYP was already selling NMIXX’s Ad Mare album as a blind package before any of the members were even revealed :laugh

Yeah, it's definitely not exclusive to Kpop, though I remember mu surprise at how affordable these amazingly well-designed releases were back when I got into Kpop some 10 years ago. Even when J-releases are more elaborate they tend to be quite expensive.

i’ve noticed it’s because the items tend to be more expensive and then on top of that the shipping is astronomical too, online kpop stores tend to factor that in when pricing their albums cuz even tho shipping is also high, they’ll usually reduce the price for the item itself to make up for it

I really hope the new album will be better than A ONE and MADE IN JAPAN :meditate

This may play a part too (buying Jpop was definitely better 20 years ago - €40 would deliver two albums to your doorstep, pretty much) but CDs and DVDs are also just very expensive in Japan (like many things). Unless that changes I don't think there will be a Kpop-like model for Jpop. I've bought a bunch of (non-Ayu) Jpop albums over the years and they are usually around €25-€30 for a plain, single CD version in a jewelcase. I have routinely bought fancy Kpop editions (all in all, I think I jave one in a jewelcase, and it isn't even a plain one - with the exception of a Japanese edition of the third SNSD album) and they never even cost me above €20 shipped (2013 was prime Kpop buying era for me and new releases were often around $11! Insane to think.

on ktown4u they sell albums for less than $20 and i assume that the shipping isn’t as bad in other places cuz people seem to like using that site. i tried but to where i live it ended up being wayyyy too expensive but that’s just something i have to deal with living in puerto rico 😭

Ah, that sucks! Yeah, shipping has been getting worse and worse over the years. Also, since last year I've consistently been paying import duties (+ often some processing fees) which has made buying stuff overseas less and less interesting. At least Kpop is so popular it's showing up in regular stores here, maybe Puerto Rico will have this too?

unfortunately that isn’t the case bcuz the one store that had some type of stock of kpop albums shut down and the walmart in my city that used to sell CDs (they stopped selling them recently) didn’t really have much of a kpop selection other than BTS :( i hope this will change in the future bcuz having to get everything delivered and paying extra for shipping is such a pain! i’m definitely gonna find a way to save up for ayu’s album this year tho… i’ll come up with something

Fingers crossed for you, I'm sure you'll figure something out!

Yeah, physicals are a bit on the way out, at least in terms of dedicated floor space in stores - though I recently read an article on the hippest retro music medium: CDs! :laugh

I don't think they reduce the price because of the shipping usually. Kpop albums are actually just as cheap when you buy them at physical stores in Korea, where they don't have to factor in the shipping fees. I think their pricing standards for CDs are just like that in general

And some kpop stores even add the shipping fee to the product price, to make it seem like their shipping fee is free/cheaper than other stores

Related: on a whim I went to order the new SNSD album yesterday. I haven't kept up with physicals since the Catch Me If You Can single (so I don't have Lion Heart for instance, good album though) but felt like it even without having heard it so I went to my trusty old pal Ktown4u (used to order all my K-stuff here c 2013/2014) but then was confronted with

https://svenkay.files.wordpress.com/...0_chrome-1.jpg

:shakehead

other site I've used is kpoptown, the shipping is not as expensive as ktown4u, but the price of the albums are a bit higher.
Check it out if you want ;)

Yeah, Ktown4u and Kpopmart were my most commonly used websites. I got some other suggestions on the AHS Discord which were also helpful, such as iPurple, which is European. Definitely much more expensive than a few years ago (I haven't bought any Kpop for a while :)).

Yeah shipping fees increased almost everywhere because of covid, but the degree is different on each site. Also depends on the country, since some shipping methods stopped working in certain countries

I can't help but imagine it must affect physical sales? I also do some small-time label running with tapes of experimental electronics and shipping them has become ridiculously prohibitive. Shipping from the US to anywhere already became hugely expensive a few years ago, so ordering stuff there became significantly less interesting (you'd pay $15 shipping for a $5 tape), but now The Netherlands has also followed suit, unfortunately. Unless you buy a lot of stuff, shipping just kills you. And VAT is also charged more regularly now, sometimes (more often than not in the 00s) you'd get lucky and you didn't have to pay any fees, but now 9 times out of 10 I'm charged hefty import duties.

Ah, really? I didn’t know that… I always assumed they adjusted it based on the shipping prices since sites with lower priced albums seemed to have higher shipping and vice versa, but correlation ≠ causation it seems