Recently I bought some Korean albums, usually I'm pretty picky when it comes to buying music simply because it's expensive. Japanese albums always cost ¥3,150 (40$) and ¥3,990 (50$) when there's an additional DVD, not to mention any special editions or the fact that I usually buy from yesasia which has slightly higher prices than stores in Japan (+5$ but I din't mind since the shipping to my country is free and there's no tax fee).
There are many albums I like that I'd love to have in my collection but they are simply too expensive. When I started working six years ago my monthly salary was 270$ (even though I had two jobs, at school and kindergarten) so buying just one album a month was really hard. Right now I earn more but I'm looking for a flat so I'm still thinking twice before buying something.
I've been interested in Korean music recently, at first I didn't even think about buying any Korean albums, I've been just getting them from the internet, I had too many Japanese album I wanted to buy so I didn't even think about spending them on anything else.
However, as I already said in some other post, I've been watching Korean show "We Got Married" and Yonghwa from CNBLUE was buying SNSD's album Oh! I was surprised by the look of the album, it wasn't a plastic CD case but a small book with CD at the end of the album. I checked it on yesasia and it was only 8$ I guess. I never even buy Japanese CDs (I always stick to CD+DVDs) but the photobook was so gorgeous (and I love photos on physical paper, not just on screen) that I decided to buy it.
After a while I started checking other Korean artists on yesasia and there came another surprise. Not only SNSD's album came as a nice photobook. I guess it's a normal thing in Korea that their album come in different formats and I'm not talking about special editions or First Press (although they exist and are even more crazy in size and content). The regular versions almost always come with thick booklet or the whole album is a photobook and the actual CD looks like a bonus while their price remain around 10 to 20$
First I bought some CNBLUEs and SECRET albums, with yesasia's sale each cost around 8$, then I watched We Got Married with Victoria from f(x) and Nichkhun from 2PM and I ordered some of their albums as well. Except for SNSD's Japanese album and concert which were slightly more than ten bucks I ordered 10 albums but paid less than I would for any two Japanese albums.
It bother's me when I compare Japanese releases to Korean. It's seems wrong that I paid 65$ for YFC's concert which contains only one postcard (not even a booklet!) and the DVD (which is awesome) while SNSD's concert contains 2DVD and 25p thick photobook and was 40$. Maybe that's a poor example but there are Korean releases that have even more good and still keep the price low.
Also I never understood why Korean releases of Japanese albums have much lower price.
I used to appreciate the fact that Japanese albums all have the same CD+DVD case or double case, both are of the same height and look neat on the shelf, I can use the space above them for other things and nothing is falling off them but with the Korean albums I like their diversity although it gets quite bothersome when they are too big. Right now I keep them anywhere since I'm moving out soon, I cannot wait till I'll be able to plan a special space for them and start organising my collection ( ´ ▽ ` )
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