Although I’ve discussed numerous aspects of how I organize my international music thus far, I still have some random topics left. This time, I’m covering repackage albums, pre-release singles, album art, and star ratings.
Repackage Albums
A repackage is an album that is re-released a few months after it initially came out, with a new name, a new concept/cover, and two or three new songs. The original album is literally repackaged and sold as a completely different album.
These kinds of albums aren’t unique to K-Pop either. A lot of American artists put out repackages too, though they usually call them things like “Special Edition,” “Deluxe Edition,” or more recently, “Anniversary Edition/Version.” Think of Beyoncé’s B’Day Deluxe Edition album, where her duet with Shakira, “Beautiful Liar,” and a few other songs were added to the B’Day track list.
Repackages were recently a hot topic of conversation on K-Pop Twitter, so I was forced to take a closer look at how I feel about them, how I’ve been handling them, and how I plan to deal with them going forward.
Honestly, I’m not fond of repackages. As much as I love getting new songs and concept photos that soon after the original album came out, they cause me problems. First, there’s the extra cost. I usually already own the original version of the album, so I end up having to spend more money to get the new songs.
The second, most important problem with repackages is that the new songs disrupt my library. I have to decide whether I want to A) apply some iTunes magic to merge the two sets of songs into a single album (under the repackage’s title), or B) let the new songs stand as their own album. Historically, I’ve gone with option B. It’s not really worth the hassle to merge the albums.
For example, my ult group NCT 127 released their latest album 2 Baddies in September 2022. Then in January 2023, they released Ay-Yo, the repackaged version of 2 Baddies. Ay-Yo has three new songs—“Ay-Yo,” “Skyscraper,” and “DJ”— in addition to the 12 songs from the original album. Since I already owned 2 Baddies, I only bought the new songs.
Here’s how I would have to alter the metadata of the song “Faster,” which first appeared on 2 Baddies, if I wanted to merge 2 Baddies and Ay-Yo into one album:
1) Change the Album from 2 Baddies to Ay-Yo.
2) Change the Track from #1 to #2 to match Ay-Yo‘s track listing.
3) Replace the 2 Baddies cover with Ay-Yo‘s in the Artwork field.
From there, I would have to repeat those steps for the rest of the 2 Baddies songs. Do you see why I don’t bother changing anything? In fact, I plan to continue leaving the repackages alone.
Pre-Release Singles
The pre-release single is closely related to the repackage album—and is yet another area of irritation for me. Artists often put out a few songs from their upcoming album early as a way to drum up interest. I like to think of them as appetizers. For these singles, which each appear as an individual album, I use the aforementioned iTunes magic to merge them with the full album.
You’re probably wondering why I merge pre-release singles with their full album when I just said that it’s too much work to do the same for repackage songs and their original album. My reasoning is that I rarely listen to repackage songs with the rest of the songs. I’m used to the flow of the original album’s songs and adding the new songs to the track list messes that up. But with pre-release singles, I can’t listen to the album as a whole when the songs are scattered all over the place on different albums. It makes more sense to merge them.
Here’s an example. Stray Kids’ Japanese EP, CIRCUS, had three pre-release singles: “CIRCUS,” “Maniac (Japanese Version),” and “Your Eyes.” I downloaded them all from Freegal as they were released and downloaded the rest of the songs when the full EP came out. Then I merged them all into one album. I changed the Album name of the singles, which were all named after the single’s title, to “CIRCUS” and adjusted their Track numbers accordingly.
I should note that changing the album art for the singles during the merge isn’t strictly necessary. The full album’s cover is represented by its first track’s cover. So unless the first track is a single whose cover differs from the full album’s cover, you don’t have to change it. You’ll only see its cover when the song plays. Personally, I change the art for consistency’s sake.
I didn’t have to change the album art for the CIRCUS pre-release singles because they all used the full album’s cover, but I did eventually change the cover for their single “CASE 143 (Japanese Version)” from their other Japanese album THE SOUND.
I’ve accumulated many other ways of dealing with pre-release singles over the years as well. The most effective of these solutions—and one that I still occasionally employ—is to download the version of the single from the full album if I got it from Freegal. Losing a weekly download is an acceptable sacrifice to avoid an iTunes headache. The only downside to this method is that it creates a lot of duplicates because I don’t feel comfortable deleting the original copy of the song.
One of my earliest solutions was to create a playlist around the single(s) and the rest of the album so I could listen to them all together. It worked well enough, but I stopped doing it because I ended up with too many of those mini playlists. They began to clutter up my library, and God forbid I forget to sync the whole playlist.
The Sort As solution, where I would put the full album’s name into the Sort As field, was not particularly helpful. Theoretically, it makes the single part of the full album without having to change any metadata, but it’s just an illusion where iTunes arranges the full album and the single side by side. Useless.
Album Art
Every album in my music library must have a cover. Period. It truly irks me when I see a generic gray box amongst the beautiful album covers. Even if an album doesn’t have official art for whatever reason, I’ll find something appropriate to put there.
Songs that I get from Freegal and albums that I rip from CDs can be a mixed bag when it comes to album art. The netbook that houses my music library runs an unsupported version of iTunes, so sometimes the cover comes in right, but it often comes in wrong or not at all. At that point, I do a quick Wiki search to find the right cover. There have also been times when I had to scan the liner notes myself to get the cover.
My other album art rule is that the cover has to be from the album version I own (J-Pop) or the standard cover (K-Pop).
When I was buying imported J-Pop CDs, they came in three versions with three different covers. I almost always bought the cheapest version. Even though all of the covers were nice, there were times when I liked the cover from one of the other versions more. However, I decided that I would never use a cover from a version I didn’t buy. I know that sounds silly.
It’s pretty much the same deal for K-Pop. There are so many versions of a single album that I don’t even know what some of them are. As much as I like the versions with a group member’s face as the cover, it’s easier to just use the standard cover, the main version that you see on social media and on streaming sites.
## Star Ratings ##
In iTunes, you can rate your songs on a scale of one to five stars (or not at all). Before I got into J-Pop and K-Pop, I didn’t use ratings at all. After I got into those genres, they became the only songs that I rated.
Ratings were a way for me to keep track of the songs I liked the most on an album so I would know which ones to sync to my iPod and iPad. Five- and four-star songs were automatically included. Three-star songs were included, but they were the first to go when I needed to free up space on my device. Songs with less than three stars were out.
I’ve stopped using ratings again. Ratings, much like genres, are so arbitrary. What’s the difference between a five-star song and a four-star one? No, really. What does that single star difference represent? That I like one song slightly more than the other? Can I truly like two five-star songs exactly the same amount?
On top of that, I realized that I was giving almost every song five stars. Of course I was! I obviously like it a lot if I buy or download it. But if every song is five stars, the whole system becomes pointless. I would just be loading my entire library onto my devices.