The South Korean government seeks to encourage the adoption of eco-friendly album production practices in the K-pop industry, amid mounting concerns about excessive album packaging harming the environment. The Ministry of Environment announced on Sunday that it will offer consulting services to K-pop agencies in collaboration with the Ministry of Culture starting this month. The initiative includes educating members of the Recording Industry Association of Korea about existing regulations on excessive packaging.
These regulations, which currently don't apply to K-pop albums, limit packaging to a single layer and mandate a space utilization ratio in which empty space within the package cannot exceed 50 percent. However, the Ministry of Environment acknowledged the challenges of applying these regulations to albums. "Since albums are products sold worldwide, it's difficult to uniformly apply domestic packaging regulations on them,” the ministry official said.
Despite the exemption, the Ministry of Environment hopes to foster voluntary compliance by guiding production companies. Individual consulting services are also available to local entertainment agencies. While the K-pop craze has driven annual physical album sales past 100 million, there are currently no regulations addressing marketing practices that encourage excessive packaging and bulk purchases.
Sales of physical albums on the Recording Industry Association of Korea's top 400 chart surged by 49 percent last year, ac.
