Asian Junkie Asian pop. Without discretion.
This week in ‘massive fuck-ups of basic shit’, LOONA’s distributor Kakao M has managed to mess up essentially every aspect of getting LOONA’s album ‘[X X]‘ to the people who actually want to listen to it.
Earlier this year, Kakao M were announced as LOONA’s distributor, and this was generally accepted to be a good move for LOONA inside Korea. It should have meant LOONA getting onto the front page of Melon, as well as having their music video on the 1TheK YouTube channel.
Well enter Kakao M and the myriad ways they proceeded to fuck things up.
Firstly, production of all versions of LOONA’s album were delayed on the day of the album’s release due to the number of pre-orders, and it looked like the albums wouldn’t be printed to even attempt to keep up with them. Kakao M released a statement saying that the Limited A/B versions of the album would no longer be produced, and the Normal A/B would be ordered again but not until the day after release.
Kpop Mart have said that their orders for the album will be shipped on a ‘first come, first served’ basis.
Meanwhile, LOONA’s label Blockberry Creative have only briefly addressed the mess saying that they’re working on it.
Though obviously nothing has been resolved as of yet.
In addition to the massive fuck-up with the physical albums, the distributor also managed to mess up the digital sales of the album outside Korea. According to Apple, the distributor wanted to sell each track off the album as a single, and so far on iTunes this is the only way to buy the album if you want it — track by track, individually.
For the final nail in the coffin, LOONA’s album was listed on Spotify under the wrong profile. Instead of listing it under LOONA’s stylised ‘LOOΠΔ’, it was released under a separate profile of a singer named ‘Loona’. This does seem to have been corrected now, but this is a weird error to make considering LOONA’s various sub-units have had all their music listed correctly.
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In short, for a big distributor like Kakao M to make a series of super basic rookie errors, it’s … really weird. I’ve seen over-printing albums, I’ve seen manipulation of digital charts to inflate play counts, and all sorts of other antics, but I’ve never seen a distributor and record label somehow totally fail to anticipate demand and also make their own lives difficult in quite this way. Strange all round and who knows how much this has already cost the company and group.
