Photocards, Lucky Draws, Pre-Order Benefits, Oh My!
Little pieces of cardboard or lucky charms? Into the wild world of photocard collecting, and how we got here.
To the undiscerning eye, a printed, credit-card sized selfie on a piece of card stock might not be remarkable. However, to K-Pop merch collectors and fans, photocards (or, “pcs,” colloquially) are $5, $10, or $20+ collectible items. They go everywhere with you, clipped to bags in cute, thematic keychain-holders. Fans cheekily place photocards in merch-pile summoning circles to bring ticketing success. In a recent TikTok trend, fans prop up their photocards across from them at dinner to complete the dinner party: “When your table for two (fans) becomes a table for four (fans, and their respective bias in photocard form.)“ Wherever many a K-Pop stan goes, so too, does a photocard of their bias.
The printed cards feature a K-Pop artist flashing a peace sign, finger heart, or, in some, often more expensive cases, snuggling up to some adorable prop (fruit, plushes, even live animals). Usually procured by purchasing albums, merchandise, or attending special events, photocard culture exploded in the late 2010s and beyond. Nowadays, bringing a carefully selected photocard to concerts, cupsleeve events, or even something as mundane as a meal at Olive Garden is a cheeky expression of fandom, a secret code to other fans, dangling from your bag.
Trading cards are not a novel phenomenon. As early as the 1860s, baseball fans purchased candy or cigarettes to acquire the first baseball cards. Nowadays, Pokémon cards dominate the trend cycle, with Twitch streamers and TikTokers opening packs on live, reselling, and chasing elusive ultra-rare cards. Photocards, baseball cards, and Pokémon cards all follow the same relative “gacha” model: you don’t exactly know what you’re getting until you open the package.
It wasn’t until 2010, with the release of Girls’ Generation’s album Oh!, that photocards became a staple of physical K-Pop albums. While fellow SM Entertainment Artist, TVXQ!, included photocards in their 2007 Japanese single “Summer: Summer Dream,” Oh!’s rousing success is typically credited for bringing photocards into the K-Pop market.
K-Pop didn’t invent the concept of albums accompanied with printed collectibles. Prior to Oh’s release in 2010, J-Pop artists used printed “bromides” (photographic portraits) of singers and musicians. and in the 1980s, Motown Records included photocard-like card sets with many of their artists’ releases. With the success of Oh!, K-Pop records began to include randomized photocards of individual members in their albums, with this gradually expanding to include posters, stickers, and other, more unique album inclusions (socks, crochet kits, shoelaces, to name a few oddball inclusions.)
Throughout K-Pop’s third generation, albums typically included one or two random photocards, featuring an image member of the group that correlates with the respective album version.
The “Archive Box” version of TAEMIN’s 2023 album Guilty featured shoebox packaging, a false bottom, a receipt, shoelaces, and a candy wrapper to elicit feelings of voyeuristic guilt in the album owner.
As “pulling” a photocard became synonymous with purchasing a K-Pop album throughout the 2010s, entertainment companies also expanded the number of K-Pop album versions. Each version promised a different concept and, most often, a new, different photocard. Diehard collectors could now buy multiple versions of the same release in order to own multiple photocards of their bias each era. It grew sales, it solidified fan loyalty, and introduced a new element to K-Pop fandom: collecting.
As photocards grew album demand, companies incentivized additional fan events through photocards. Concerts featured exclusive photocards for card-holding fanclub members, trading card packs, à la Pokémon card packs, accompanied every concert or fanmeeting merch drop, and fan-made “photocard templates” began to emerge to serve as wishlists for fans to keep track of which photocards they still had yet to collect. As a result, photocards slowly became a feature of the K-Pop industry throughout the 2010s.
2020: the year of pandemic, cancelled performances, cancelled fansigns, and revenue loss for the K-Pop industry. As fans found themselves with more time on their hands, income that wasn’t going towards concert tickets or in-person fansigns, and the loss of any in-person community, one thing stood the test: little adorable pieces of collectible cardboard. Photocard collecting exploded over the pandemic.
As in-person fansigns halted due to the pandemic, fancalls took their place. Artist-fan engagement went global. Boy-group MCND led the charge, hosting the first fancall event in March 2020. With the invention of fancalls, a phenomenon emerged: the fancall photocards and POBs (a.k.a. Pre-Order Benefits). Fans received unique photocards when they bought albums for a specific fancall event, from a specific shop, and/or within a specific time period. These limited event photocards introduced hundreds of limited, rare photocards into the market. Where a 2019 K-Pop comeback might have four unique individual photocards of your bias to collect (say, two per version for a two-version album), suddenly a 2021 album featured 40 unique photocards. In order to account for the volume of pre-order benefits, limited event photocards, and versions, die-hard collectors purchased dozens of the same albums from multiple shops to obtain all the pre-order benefits.
Recognizing the demand for photocards over the pandemic, the amount of album versions also grew, with five, six, seven different packagings, concepts, and, of course, novel photocards. Album sales grew and grew. Gaon Chart (now Circle Chart) reports a little over $40 million total K-Pop album sales in 2020, and by 2023 that number had tripled to over $115 million albums.
A preview for limited edition fancall event photocard benefits for STAYC’s 2021 Comeback Stereotype.
Albums purchased from the shop Makestar between November 7, 2021 and November 10, 2021 recieved these limited edition photocards. It is common for shops to blur the limited POB photocards until release, to incentivize collectors to purchase in the hopes that the photocard is extremely cute, or in high-demand. >
Clever international fans organized grassroots “group orders” or “GOs” through social media, where one fan, or the “group order manager” collects funds to bulk order albums and other merchandise and distribute it to other fans in order to save on shipping and increase fans’ ability to obtain their bias through a bulk order. Ergo, buying one album gives you one chance to pull your favorite member; one person buying 40 albums for 40 people, taking everyones’ preferences into account, and distributing accordingly gives one a better chance of obtaining their favorite. Scams ensued, friendships ensued, and hyper-specific acronym-ridden collector vernacular came to be the norm. Ever heard of a DWAYOR?
“Photocards eat first!” A group of K-Pop fans eating lunch with their photocards, courtesy of the author.
Certain photocards obtained celebrity status in their own right. You didn’t have to be a MOA (fan of the group TOMORROW X TOGETHER) to know the power of the iconic Soobin Blue Hour R-Version photocard, which to this day retails for over $70 on many secondhand merch selling platforms, despite being neither limited run nor out-of-print. It’s debatable if the market rate is worth the price or not: with every approximately $25 USD copy of this version of the Blue Hour album there is a 1 in 5 chance of pulling this photocard. Of course, it flew off the shelves. Not only do photocards capitalize off of fanbase loyalty, there’s that nagging, undeniable gambling element that comes with the territory of buying multiples of the same album in pursuit of the pulling the one.
Where does this lead to the present? Photocards go where K-Pop stans go: dinner, the movies, concerts, or flights. It’s common to see photocard binders on the shelf of a K-Pop stan propped up, no doubt housing their own personal collection of cardboard selfies (well, not necessarily selfies, but fan consensus is that selfies are the preferred medium). Decorating toploaders with stickers or crocheted frames for photocards emerged as its own art form.
And while photocard collecting doesn’t need to be a part of participating in K-Pop fandom, many fans find community in trading, displaying, and snapping cute little pictures with photocard of their favorite K-Pop idols out and about. It’s a bit silly, a bit fun, and one of the many ways us K-Pop fans showcase our fandom.