As technology advances, our lives have changed in many ways. The way I listen to music has also changed quite a lot. Until the mid-1990s, it was common to purchase CDs or cassette tapes to listen to singers’ music. Then, in the late 1990s, as technology developed, ‘ MP3’, a low-capacity audio file standard , was developed.

MP3 is an audio file whose capacity is reduced by removing unnecessary parts when people listen to sound. The sound quality is similar, but the data size is only 1/10. Thanks to this, you can listen to thousands of songs on one device as you do now. Since the 2000s, MP3 players have been explosively popular. Since then, with the development of media such as feature phones and the Internet, the era of listening to music centered on digital sources rather than records has opened in earnest.

Now, with the arrival of the smartphone era, you can listen to the music you want to listen to anytime, anywhere through various music streaming apps such as Melon, Genie, and Apple Music. But that doesn’t mean the music market has declined at all. Even today, CD records are sold steadily. In particular, idols with large fandoms such as BTS and Seventeen are well known for selling more than 1 million albums even now. Few people have a CD

player at home these days . Even if you buy a CD , the CD itself has little practical use. Still, fans buy records. This is because album sales help singers achieve good results. In addition, the album includes a photo card and a pictorial of the singer. Unlike digital music, there are physical goods that can be held in the hand. So, unlike before, it seems that CDs are being sold for the purpose of collecting goods. CD players are disappearing… Why still only CDs ? There’s even a kit album!

BLACKPINK Jisoo’s 1st Single ‘[ ME ]’ Kit Album

However, in fact, albums that can be operated on smart devices while serving as physical goods like CDs have already been around for a long time . The main character is the ‘Kit Album’ developed by Muse Live in 2017. The reporter also came to use the kit album by chance, but I wasn’t familiar with it even though it was a fairly old concept before I tried it. That said, if you ask if he was a ‘muggle’ indifferent to idol ‘virtue’, that’s not the case either. I was just so used to CDs that I didn’t notice the existence of this new medium.

A kit album is a medium that drives album contents on smart devices such as smartphones with audio signals. Here, ‘kit’ is a kind of encrypted authentication token, and when you authenticate it on your smartphone, the album works.

Source: Kitbetter

The kit album has two connection types: earphone type and button type. In the past, smartphones had separate earphone connection terminals, so they were mainly released as earphone types. However, most smartphones these days do not have earphone connection terminals. So the button type has become mainstream.

Video and sound content at once… How to use the ‘pretty good’ kit album

BLACKPINK Jisoo’s 1st Single ‘[ ME ]’ Kit Album

Kit album I received myself, I was surprised by the compact composition than I thought. First of all, the package is definitely smaller than a normal album. Still, it had everything like a normal album. When I opened it, there was a photo card, several photos, a lyric book, kit album instruction manual, and a photo holder. At the bottom, there was a kit containing album contents.

To run the album on your smartphone, you must first download the dedicated app ‘ Kit Player ‘. After that, run the app, place the button on the top of the kit on the smartphone microphone and press it for 2 to 3 seconds.

It was a ‘kit’ that drives album contents on a smartphone, and it was a small size that was almost the same as the AirPods Pro.

The kit then sends an encrypted audio signal to the microphone to download the contents of the album to your smartphone. Once you run the kit on your smartphone, you can continue listening to the album for 24 hours without having to run it again.

After using the kit album, it was quite a refreshing experience to be able to use the album entirely with a smartphone without a CD player. Moreover, in the app, you can use not only sound sources but also video content such as music videos, and there is also a fan community function. We thought that the fan community feature would also be great for feeling connected with your favorite artists and other fans.

Why did I just now know… Kit album, recommended to such a person!

The screen when playing a kit album in the dedicated app. The far right screen is the fan community function.

In the era of smartphones, the influence of digital music has grown more than that of singers’ CD records. In fact, even when counting the number 1 score on a music show, the biggest part is the digital music score. However, CDs are still meaningful to fans . Digital sound sources are nothing to be caught in hand, but CDs have a strong concept of physical goods, as mentioned earlier.

However, once you buy it, there are many cases where you never use the CD itself, so you must have been left with regret. The kit album seems to be a good medium to soothe the fans’ disappointment. The kit album has been used in 211 countries around the world so far, and it is said that more than 5 million copies have been sold. Also, like CD albums토토사이트, one of its strengths is that it is included in the singer’s album sales tally.

Kit album by Jason Mraz / Source: Kitbetter

The kit album that I happened to use gave me a pretty fruitful experience, to the point where I thought, ‘Why did I only know about it now?’ It’s been quite a while since it appeared, but it’s true that the usage rate is still lower than that of CD records. In the future, attention is paid to whether kit albums can become ‘real next-generation albums’ that will replace CD albums.