Since the last few years digital sales may be more important than sales of CDs in Korea, but that does not mean the CD has completely played out its role as a carrier of music. In some segments of Korea’s indie scene it’s still more common to release a CD than set up a digital distribution deal, and if those make it into a store at all it is usually on the shelves of Hyang Music that they can be found.

Having long been the primary music retailer for fans of Korean indie music Hyang Music’s album sales chart tends to provide a fairly good overview of popular releases. Here’s what the TOP10 looked like for the first week of January:

1. Lucid Fall – 아름다운 날들 (-)
2. IU – Last Fantasy (-)
3. Idiotape – 11111101 (-)
4. Zitten – 백야 (+3)
5. Apollo 18 – The Black Album (+14)
6. Number Nine – TV를 끄면 좋겠어 (new)
7. Lim Ji Hoon – Organ Orgasm (+13)
8. Siwa – Down To Earth (-4)
9. Dynamic Duo – Digilog 2/2 (new)
10. Kim Mokin – 음악가 자신의 노래 (-2)

Additionally a bunch of new k-indie oriented releases entered the chart in the lower half of to the TOP100:

72. Story Seller – XX
82. VOY – VOY meet girl
83. Hermin – Melody
85. Blue Near Mother – Mexico
89. Shin Hye Sung – Embrace

A bunch of the new releases on the chart have been covered on this blog before, but we might as well also have a look at the ones we didnt.

TV를 끄면 좋겠어 is the first single from four member indie rock band Number Nine, released January 5th. No music video for any of the three songs have been revealed yet, but the band’s label shared a live performance of the title track on YouTube yesterday:

Hip hop act Dynamic Duo released their sixth full-length album on January 4th and have been promoting “거기서거기” since:

Hermin won the 15th Yoo Jae Hae Music Contest, held in 2004, and has since released three full-length albums in Korea. The last one came in 2009, half a year after releasing her first Japanese album. On December 14th maxi single melody got a release in Japan including the title track and “10년의 세월”/”10年の歳月” both in Japanese and Korean versions, and the Korean release followed on January 5th. Originally being aimed for the Japanese market two songs from Hermin’s third Korean album, Blossom, were included as well. Here’s the music video for “My Little Cat”:

Blue Near Mother have been around for a decade already, but it wasn’t till they entered KBS2’s survival audition show Top Band that their name began to get some recognition. After the show they got picked up by Cherry Filter‘s Rocat Punch Music Group with Mexico being the first single released by BNM on the new label, out January 4th. The title track is the band’s own composition, but the single also contains covers of George Michael‘s “Careless Whisper” and Sim Soo Bong‘s “그때 그 사람“.

Sources: Hyang Music; HMV Japan