In her recent sudden press conference, ADOR’s CEO Min Hee-jin openly targeted K-pop agencies for increasing sales by including random photo cards of group members in their albums, holding fan signing events for people with large-scale purchase of albums. After the press conference, K-pop fans applauded Min’s courage for criticizing the industry’s chronic problems. The remarks drew great repercussions among K-pop fans because many victims of the so-called “album gang,” who purchased as few as dozens to as many as hundreds of albums to win the photo card or fan signing event.
However, CEO Min’s remarks from the industry were neither more nor less than irony.
Random photo cards started with Girls’ Generation and Min Hee-jin
The K-pop market sees the start of this photo card trend as the second full album “Oh!” released by the group Girls’ Generation in 2010. Members’ photo cards were randomly inserted into the album, opening the wallets of domestic and foreign SONEs (Girl’s Generation’s fandom name), including the “uncle fans.”
In order to get a photo card of their favorite member, fans began to purchase several copies of the same album, and a culture of exchanging, buying, and selling these photo cards among fans also arose. This type of albums, which became a sensation at the time, turned into an opportunity to revitalize the music market, which was on the decline as the streaming market was born.
Girls’ Generation released an additional second full repackage album “Run Devil Ru” and third mini album “Hoot” that year. They became the first girl group to win the Daesang (Grand Prize) for Album at the Golden Disc Awards.
CEO Min, who joined SM Entertainment (SM) in 2002 as a public recruitment employee, is a person who has contributed greatly to the albums of SM singers since 2009. “Oh” is also an album that she worked on, and CEO Min was listed alone as the person in charge of “Visual Direction” on the credit of this album.
The photo card culture has been created and put into practice by SM, and now it is pointed out as a “disease” by Min, a former SM creative director. Some in the industry are pointing out that it is “ironic.”
NewJeans does it too
Min Hee-jin’s statement at the press conference showed her confidence, implying “NewJeans doesn’t do it.” However, the industry’s perspective was entirely different. The prevailing opinion was that NewJeans indeed does it.
The reason for the criticism that using the term ‘random photocard’ is ambiguous but essentially the same lies in the ‘random album’.
NewJeans released their debut album in six different versions for each member, with a total of ten types including the Weverse version. Because these were sold randomly, NewJeans fans also had to engage in ‘album buying sprees’ to collect all the desired versions.
Push sales fan sign events were also criticized, but NewJeans likewise held multiple lucky draw events and fan sign events to boost album sales. Records like three consecutive million-seller albums weren’t achieved by chance.
At the press conference, Min Hee-jin explained, “NewJeans doesn’t do random photocards. There are talks about random albums, but the reason we do it is because if every photo of the celebrities were included in one album, the CD would become an encyclopedia. Also, if it’s not random, the popularity of the members would be compared naturally. I really dislike that.”
It’s a plausible explanation, but it feels like a double standard. The method of encouraging fans to buy albums to achieve their goals is no different. The random albums initiated by Min Hee-jin can also be criticized as a ‘malpractice’ by future producers.
Source: daum