About collecting

Collecting has a very long history. On 3rd millenium, royalty and elites were the first ones who were seen collecting books and art. Today, people collect for example cars, antiques, geocatches, insects, autographs, plants, trading cards, books, vinyls, art, rocks, stamps, toys, money, albums and so on. You can say that there are a lot of similarities to people who collected ages ago to people who collect today. 

Although, people have been collecting for years, it's a dying hobby. Some people might think it's old fashioned and some people just don't have time and money to keep up with their collections anymore. Collecting might be expensive and take a lot of time to find the items you're collecting. Some items can be extremely rare which is why you have to be patient to find them. 💪

K-pop is pop music originating in South Korea. You can hear a lot of other genres in the music as well, because the genre was influenced by them. There are boygroups, girlgroups, groups with both girls and boys, duos and soloists. K-pop is also a big industry and the people behind it, have excellent marketing minds. They know how to sell the music. In western countries, music has been marketed through cds, vinyls and casettes, but now that we live in a streaming era, buying and listening is happening online. Physical albums are losing their magic. Meanwhile in K-pop, the albums are selling hundreds of thousands copies daily. How is that possible in this "album dying" era? 😮

Well...the masterminds of K-pop have invented photocards, stickers, postcards, posters, etc. that they put inside the albums and sell them to the fans of K-pop. The key is a little piece of paper, the so called "photocard". When you buy an album of your favourite artist or group, you open the album and get different inclusions including the photocard or couple of photocards that are included in almost every album. The photocard is a selfie or picture of a random member or idol so you don't know whose photocard you're going to get before you open the album. 🙈

Some photocards are extremely rare and they can be very valuable. You can either keep it, trade it or sell it. There are also photocards in official events like for example concerts or fansigns and only people who attend them are able to get them. So other people who can't attend can buy the photocards later, but they can be really expensive, because not a lot of photocards are given at these events.

The albums are not like ours in the western countries either, they do have a cd, but it's the least important part of the album because fans usually buy the album for the photocards. The album can have plastic covers but K-pop fans are not so happy whenever they make the packaging like that. The albums are usually thick and book size and besides of the cd and the inclusions, there is a photobook, which is usually quite heavy. 

The price tag is also not the same. Western albums are 1-20 € while K-pop albums can be even 30-100 € depending a lot on the weight, the store you buy it from and what the album includes. If it doesn't include photocards, the value of the album drops by half. The rarity is also a major factor. 

My journey with K-pop started in 2012 when I heard some of the songs for the first time. I didn't quite like it so the second time I came across it was in 2016 when my friend made me listen to some songs from a boygroup called BTS. I did like some of the songs but I still didn't really get so into the genre. Then in 2018, YouTube recommended me a song from a girl group called BlackPink and I immediately fell in love. I thought they would be the only K-pop group I'd like but after some time I found more cool K-pop girl groups and loved them even more. 

My journey as a collector started when I was a kid. I collected rocks, seashells and stamps. After some
time, I found out they make albums in K-pop too and I was really surprised to see the benefits of collecting, meaning the amount of stuff you get from the albums and how many new friends you can meet through trading the photocards. So I bought my first K-pop album in January 2019. I didn't want to collect certain members at first, I just wanted to keep whoever I got, but I was too tempted to collect all my favourite idol's photocards so now I'm completely addicted and it seems like it's almost impossible to stop. 😂😍

Now I have 97 albums and 311 photocards and more coming as I'm writing this. 😅

My album shelf so far: