When I am writing – and I almost always write at home, in my living room – I listen to CDs. Not to vinyl records, which are too active, with the tiresome need to turn over the platter every twenty minutes, and their audible accumulation of dust; nor to mp3s or streaming, which are too passive, playlists eventually transforming into some gross Costa Coffee–ambient or autotuned slop if you leave them alone. I like CDs, because of a certain way of listening to and, let’s be honest, consuming music, which I developed at the peak of the format in the 1990s. CDs were then the default way of listening to music, combining digital neatness of sound with a pocket version of 1950s–70s commodity fetishism, with artwork, sleeve notes, and lyric sheets inviting the exploration of para-musical worlds. By the middle of the 1990s, they had reached absurd levels of cross-marketing, with the average CD single coming in three different versions, with postcards, stickers, and scratch-and-sniff panels coming bundled with the B-Sides.

I never stopped buying these things, but in the 2010s they became increasingly hard to come by in Europe, bar charity shops and holdouts the further east you went. (I will always cherish the Polish Jazz CD stall, run by a single enthusiast behind Sezam Department Store in Warsaw.) In London, the likes Rough Trade began to relegate their CDs to darkened corners of the shop, used largely by lost Gen Xers and Geriatric Millennials. The LP shelves now dominated, and were given over to outlandishly overpriced luxury trash (why not spend £40 for a 180gsm copy of the first Shed Seven album?). For many years, I wanted real shelves for my CDs. While decent bookcases are hard to find today – IKEA’s appalling Billy cases, made out of wood shavings, are the most common, and eventually start buckling under the weight of any decent collection of books – CD storage is even more difficult, because of the apparent obsolescence of the format, though junk markets and eBay will find you various gross 1990s storage solutions.

In the flat my civil partner and I moved into four years ago there is now a corner of built-in CD shelves. I stare at them less often than the bookshelves – CDs in enfilade are less immediately fascinating than books, due to those clear plastic jewel cases – but I also use them more frequently. At the bottom of the shelves is a row of CD boxes that don’t fit. Many of these are the usual sort of rubbish one would expect from someone in their early 40s – Bowie and Beatles and Philadelphia International box sets, a Daphne Oram box, Light in the Attic compilations packaged as ‘books’, my partner’s complete Deutsche Harmonia Mundi – but there is also a row of stranger objects. One is in a silver plastic bag; another is a tall bright blue book with a digital photocollage of Ionic columns and held hands on the cover; there is a slipcase with a pink ribbon around it; and also a cardboard box covered in images of the early 2000s cartoon The Powerpuff Girls. These are the K-Pop CDs.

In his pocket-book on the format, Compact Disc (Bloomsbury, 2020), Robert Barry writes of an uptick in CD sales in Japan: Tokyo still has a giant Tower Records just off the ‘scramble crossing’ in Shibuya, its Times Square or Piccadilly Circus. This upturn was driven not by the likes of me, doggedly buying out of convenience, inertia, and thrift the near-obsolete format of their adolescence, but rather a result of the marketing of Idols, the J-Pop groups and stars whose obsessive fans will buy every permutation of every CD single. That increase in sales has now spread globally, with CD sales rising every year since 2022. This isn’t because of me or my friends buying bundles in charity shops or picking up Soul Jazz compilations in the Sounds of the Universe shop. It’s because of K-Pop. While J-Pop’s formal conventions and expanded CD editions were aimed solely at that country’s massive internal market, K-Pop has ruthlessly reoriented them towards the world outside, in a largely state-planned global expansion of the South Korean culture industry. Industry is very much the word, with girl groups and dramas following cars and phones.

I first became more than dimly aware of K-Pop in 2023, in a railway station in Osaka, as thousands of people in Blackpink T-shirts suddenly appeared, en route to a concert. Our interest piqued after that trip, my partner undertook the then-difficult task of finding a K-Pop group that Wire readers in their 40s would find palatable, and came up with Stay-C, and their album Young Luv, which comes in a silver bag, with a transfer tattoo, a ‘book’ of photographs and a Polaroid portrait of a band member. After that, we both became, in the parlance, ‘obsessed’ with the girl group NewJeans, whose music was genuinely exciting, the singers flitting line-by-line from Korean to English and back over hyperactive, dainty backdrops which borrowed liberally from the music of my actual youth (bumping, skipping ultra-femme UK Garage tunes like ‘Sweet Like Chocolate’ and ‘Flowers’, most obviously). I then started picking up K-Pop CDs in central London’s remnant music department store Fopp, carefully waiting until the coast was clear of young people to avoid their embarrassment and mine.

Next to NMixx’s Blue Valentine (no relation to the Tom Waits album) and Le Sserafim’s Easy (which sounds unexpectedly like Veruca Salt), NewJeans’ 2nd EP has pride of place, bundled with a kaleidoscopic package of photobooks, zines (in which NewJeans tell us ‘Ten Things We Love About Summer’), transfers and stickers, none of which I will ever use, and some rather good landscape photos by band members; photographs of Seoul scenes, steel bridges and parks, amateurish like my own photographs of that city on a research trip some years ago. NewJeans recently lost a legal case against their corporate masters, a pivotal moment in an abortive fight against Korean music industry’s brutal culture of band management and fan service. The band members tried and failed to be treated as something more than commodities. As I work at my desk in my own vastly smaller, rather less glamorous but also rather less exploitative corner of the culture industry, I can look at these packages at the bottom of my shelf, which celebrate forever the band’s mass-produced individuality.