indieBerlin talked to Ronny Krieger about the new format that's already huge in K-Pop; growing in the US (with artists like Snoop Dogg, Metallica, and Duran Duran already releasing on it), but almost unknown in Europe: the KiTalbum. Ronny is the man who sniffed it out (courtesy of a daughter's K-Pop obsession) and is now launching it here. Luyisane (a Berliner up-and-coming indie pop artist herself) talked to him on our behalf.
The full interview is up on indieBerlin's youtube; and short punchy bits are even now circulating on Insta Reels on the @indieberlin.official channel.
Luysiane: Hi, so I'm Luysiane and this is Ronny Krieger and I will ask him questions today about the KiTalbum for indieBerlin. So first tell me something about yourself. Who are you? What do you do?
Ronny: Yeah, my name is Ronny Krieger. As mentioned, I'm part of the music industry for quite some time now. I used to be in a band from the late 80s to the early 90s. I used to work at record labels and distribution companies and was part of building a download shop. And basically through that experience at Beatport, this download shop, I discovered my interest in the digital side of the music industry and have ever since been working with lots of different companies in that space. And through my teenage daughter, who is a big fan of K-pop, I discovered a couple of years ago this super interesting format and invited the company over to a conference to present it and speak about the format. And now I'm doing the same for them because I developed a relationship and I really like the concept.
Luysiane: Now please tell me about your KiTalbum concept.
Ronny: It's essentially exactly the same concept that I had when I was a teenager — like listening to something, holding the artwork, reading the lyrics, looking at pictures, etc. So it was a very interesting experience for me to see that despite them growing up listening to everything on YouTube and having access to everything on streaming, once they really like something, many of them still want to own the product for multiple reasons.
I think the KiTalbum was an attempt of the K-pop industry to define how that would look like. Because vinyl wasn't really a viable option for multiple reasons. The predominant formats in K-pop cater to the interest of people — it's often books, it's heavy picture laden. Everything that the fans really want.
So where we are living in an industry that has kind of tried to dictate to the audience what the industry thinks fans want, I think K-pop did a good thing where they were listening to what fans really like and had a fresh start to invent new formats and new products. And if you go to any K-pop store or a record store, you see K-pop products — they look completely different from what we are selling.
So I think the KiTalbum was an attempt to say: we have a young audience right now that is predominantly growing up consuming music and content of any form digitally, but they want the product.
Snoop Dogg had one of the first Western KiTalbums. Public Enemy, Duran Duran, Alanis Morissette, the B-52s, but also Jimi Hendrix, Megadeth, Biohazard — it's really across multiple kinds of artists
Luysiane: Can you give me also some ideas of some more notable artists, for example, who have already used the KiTalbum concept?
Ronny: Yeah. The team comes from Korea. So essentially all of the big names in K-pop have released KiTalbums. That's on that side. And they're working with a team in the US, and the US team has been doing a great job working with predominantly the major labels. So Snoop Dogg had one of the first Western KiTalbums. Public Enemy, Duran Duran, Alanis Morissette, the B-52s, but also Jimi Hendrix, Megadeth, Biohazard — it's really across multiple kinds of artists.
And when I joined the team, I felt OK, the major world is taken care of. I'm by heart forever a member of the independent community and I see one of the main benefits of this product as accessibility — because the minimum production amount for a KiTalbum is only 30 copies, which really makes this accessible for any do-it-yourself artist or any small independent. A lot less expensive to get into it. You can just do 30 at the start. You can do a presale and the production time of the KiTalbum is a week, so you could even run a presale campaign, and if you realize you need more than 30 — you need 70 — it takes a week to produce more. So it's really a suitable product for the independent world.
So on top of the big major label artists that mostly our US team is working on, I focus more on independent labels and independent artists. We've had multiple metal labels — like Napalm Death, which is on Earache, a UK metal label. We've done a couple of techno releases — a German techno artist called Remute, there are a couple of releases from a UK techno label called Downwards, industrial releases from Death Disco. These are some of the elements I've worked on.
Just for instance, Death Disco is like a super amazing collective of artists — it's like a modern form of industrial and techno. Eros is a project from the sound engineer from Einstürzende Neubauten, who is an Australian musician, Liam from My Disco. And this is kind of like a dark punk, ambient, whatever kind of thing. Really, really, really good and an interesting concept as well, because they have a vinyl release — the only physical release that they had of the album. But they've been touring and they've been playing lots of festivals, so they have really amazing tour visuals and they made a Dolby Atmos mix.
Many artists now do the Dolby Atmos mix solely for the purpose of putting it on Apple. And there's very often — in more than 90% of the cases — there's no physical release. So this came out after the vinyl, and for the first time they had the chance to say: OK, we're taking all the pictures that have been taken at all the gigs that we played, we're taking all the tour visuals, we're taking the Dolby Atmos mix, and putting it all on one physical format. Because contrary to CD or vinyl, this is an audiovisual project, so you have the ability to do picture galleries, videos, audio files of any sort. I mentioned Dolby Atmos, it's Dolby Atmos compatible.
For instance, the Duran Duran release — Dolby Atmos version was added a year later. It was kind of like a re-release, but instead of selling something that people have to buy again, they just put the Dolby Atmos mix on the old album. So basically everyone got a free upgrade a year later.
And different to a CD and vinyl, where at the time of production you need to decide what's on it — since this is a digital platform, it's essentially just a key that gives you access to the app. You can at any point later also add additional things. You could technically take stuff away, though people might get mad if they paid for something and then you're taking it away. But you can add things.
For instance, the Duran Duran release — they didn't have the Dolby Atmos mix when it was released. So the Dolby Atmos version was added a year later. It was kind of like a re-release, but instead of selling something that people have to buy again, they just put the Dolby Atmos mix on the old album. So basically everyone got a free upgrade a year later.
And when I was working with labels and artists — Moderat is a good example from Berlin — when you put out an album, you might have the first video and the first single, maybe a remix for the first single, but not for the second, the third, the fourth. That comes over time and you have this long album life cycle. Having the ability now with the KiTalbum to say: when new things are being added to that album life cycle, I don't necessarily have to create new products all the time — I can add them to this product because they're part of the whole album experience. You may not want to do that, you may want to sell a separate product, which is fine. But you can, if you have the opportunity.
Luysiane: Could you go into detail about how it works for the consumer? So I buy it — how can I now access the music? How does it work?
Ronny: It's fairly simple. All you need to do is install the KiTplayer. It's available for Android and iOS, and it works on the tablet as well as the phone. The experience on the tablet is quite nice because you can see the lyrics and the picture galleries — it's nicer. But it also works on the phone.
When you open it, you have all kinds of inserts — which in many cases, like in K-pop, you have these special cards, the photo cards. Think back in the day you had the Panini cards or the football cards — people were collecting different athletes. In the K-pop world, it's the photo card. And you have these square inserts which could be pictures, but could also be what would usually be in a booklet — like all the credits, the lyrics, tour pictures, etc. And there are usually stickers or anything else you can think of that you want to include.
And then you have this little KiT. This is the actual KiT and as you can see, this little button here — it doesn't do anything. The funny thing is when people experience this for the first time, they are trying to open it, like OK, this is something I need to open and see what's inside. You don't open it. It's just essentially a key to your product.
Once you've installed the app on your phone, all you need to do is press this little button at the microphone of your device and then the app is prompted and says: OK, do you want to download the new album from whoever? And then it downloads all of the assets from the KiT on the app. So it's really simple — you install the app, you press this against the microphone and it asks you to download all this stuff. That's all you need to do.
Luysiane: Does the app cost something?
Ronny: No, the app is free, and essentially all of your KiTalbums live in the same app. So once you have a collection of different things, they're all accessible in the same app.
Now one of the things that is important to mention — you kind of have to re-authorize the album every 24 hours or so. Because otherwise you could essentially buy the album, download everything in your app, and sell the key to the next person. And so for an artist or label, it could end up being sold 30 times while being shared with everyone.
You can share it with friends — I do like that. So if you're in a room with your best friends and they absolutely have to listen to this album, you can put it on multiple phones. But after 24 hours, whoever has the key is the one who can listen to it again. And you don't always redownload everything — you're basically just asked to press your KiT against the microphone and instead of downloading it, it just synchronizes and says: you're still the rightful owner of the product, and then you can listen to it again.
Luysiane: OK, interesting. Can you explain again how you got involved in this whole KiTalbum concept?
Ronny: Yeah, I mean, as I said, I discovered this through my teenage daughter who is totally obsessed with K-pop. And when your kids do something that you're not very familiar with, you kind of like to understand a little bit more about it, and I did too. And then I was kind of amazed by all the different types of formats that exist in the K-pop world and I was like, this is kind of interesting and maybe we should have done the same.
As much as I despise the music itself, it's not for me, and a lot of the ethics of like these hyper-trained, hyper-commercialized elements. But the way the products are conceptualized and all of that I think is absolutely amazing. And if I think back to my teenage days, the first band I was a big fan of, and kind of still am, is Depeche Mode. And if there would have been a version like "this is the Dave Gahan version, this is the Martin Gore version," I probably would have wanted to buy definitely the one of my favorite member, and maybe all of them — to have the same album four times. The concept would have worked exactly the same way. Four different versions of the same album for every different member.
And I was kind of surprised that our industry didn't do any of that. Then I thought it was really interesting. Through my involvement with the VUT, which is the association of the independent music industry in Germany, we curate a lot of conference programming under the umbrella of the Indie Days, Reeperbahn Festival, and c/o pop, some others. So I just invited the Korean team and said: look, this concept is really interesting — would you be willing to show this to the European audience? And then they came, that's how we met. And then they asked whether I would be interested in helping them spread the word about the KiTalbum. And since I genuinely really think it's exciting and beneficial, I started to do that as one of my projects.
Luysiane: Adding to that, how do you work to get people to know about it? You said you would spread the word about it— how would you do that?
Ronny: I mean, thanks to the fact that I've been working in the industry for over 3 decades now, I do have a fairly good network of people that I can talk to and that would also listen to me — which is the other element. You can find contact information everywhere, but will people also reply? That's the other question. And it is not easy.
Usually when record labels hold it in the hand for the first time, they kind of immediately get it. Same with artists even more so. They see it and they're like, yeah, this is amazing, this is cool. Then they hear about the benefits of actually releasing music on it. And then come a couple of questions. A lot of "yeah, but my audience isn't K-pop, my audience isn't teenage fans."
So the biggest obstacle we have is to prove that this is not just solely something that works in K-pop. Just two days ago I had another label say: this is absolutely amazing, yeah, but we don't have a K-pop audience — they were a metal label. But luckily I was able to say, hey, Earache, one of the longest-standing metal labels in the world, they've put out 25 releases. You can see Megadeth, you can see Biohazard. And now this argument of "my audience wouldn't be ready for it" no longer stands, because in pretty much every genre there have been examples — it kind of works for every music genre.
And again, with 30 copies, it's fairly risk-free. But it is something that takes a lot of time and a lot of people are not willing to try something new. But I'm used to that. When I started to work for Beatport and I went around to all the record labels about downloads — this was at a time iTunes had launched 3 months earlier. So download shops didn't exist. And I was doing this in the dance music world where everybody still loved and loves vinyl and was completely against the idea of MP3. So every meeting I went to started with "we hate MP3s, why should we do this?"
So I'm kind of used to the fact that this industry has always been slow on accepting new ideas and new formats.
Luysiane: Why do you think — is it because they're scared of making losses? Or because they think they won't make enough profit? I have a feeling that many companies do it on purpose, for example with updates and stuff where you have to buy again and again.
Ronny: I think very often in my experience — and it's hard to generalize, everybody will have their own reasons — but I think people prefer things that they understand and know and have tried and tested before. Trying something new where they don't quite know how it's going to work has never been the default for most people. People like convenience and to stay in their safe zone.
But what is more surprising for me is that during the digitalization of the music industry, we've had all these periods where the industry was forced into change by technology companies — whether you look at what happened with peer-to-peer networks and MP3s, or then streaming, etc. We are coming from a history where if we don't initiate change, people dictate how that change is going to look like and then we have to accept what's being put in front of us.
I'm kind of used to the fact that this industry has always been slow on accepting new ideas and new formats.
So I now understand that even less than back in the day — when people are less inclined to try something new, because we've seen what happens if you don't proactively participate: at some point someone else is dictating. I've always been one of the people who, if it makes sense and the risk is fairly small, we try everything.
With Moderat, we had so many different formats we tried. Back then there wasn't really a way to release uncompressed high quality audio files — download shops for that didn't exist. Blu-ray production was super expensive at the time. But through our manufacturer Handle with Care in Berlin, we found out that in the gaming industry, the graphic tray that you have for CDs — someone had done an insert for that for an SD card. It happened for games. So we just bought the remaining copies of that from the game production and essentially took exactly the same packaging of the CD and put an SD card in that. On that SD card we could put the uncompressed high-res audio files. So a couple of hundred of that particular album were sold in that specific SD card version.
It wasn't a major breadwinner, it wasn't generating lots of revenue. But it was an interesting thing to do and we didn't lose money on it. So I've always been of the opinion: if you don't lose money and the risk is fairly small, try new things all the time. You might please people. That's not the mindset in our industry. It's never been, might never be.
Luysiane: What do you see happening with the KiTalbum idea over the next 12 months, and what kind of plans do you have to roll it out further?
Ronny: Yeah, I think luckily the company — there is no plan of like "we have to rule the world" or "we are there to win over the CD" or something like that. Their predominant income stream still is K-pop, because in the K-pop world, when Seventeen or Blackpink or Stray Kids do a KiTalbum, we're talking hundreds of thousands of copies — talking 10 million sold copies in that universe. So that luckily generates enough revenue to afford activities in other territories.
And after a long period of very, very slow progress and very few artists trying this out, we now have enough genre depth in all kinds of different categories to show examples that people can relate to. And now you can see with new technology you often have this hockey stick growth kind of thing — it gets very slow for a long time and then it kind of gradually peaks, and we're getting closer to that point where it's more and more and more. And I really sincerely hope that at some point we're going to just have lots more.
this is not there to replace vinyl or something — it's an additional format that has a lot of benefits for people and is fairly risk-free for artists and labels
Because this is not there to replace vinyl or something — it's an additional format that has a lot of benefits for people and is fairly risk-free for artists and labels. As I mentioned before, contrary to some of the other team members, I focus really on spreading the word for small independent labels. I've talked to different people — not just record labels either. There's the House of Music here in Berlin and they have a lot of practice rooms where artists are practicing. So it's like: should we maybe display this product here, and then people that are interested get a special discount for trying it out first? Same with venues or music shops. I'm really talking to more and more people about these kinds of concepts, just to allow especially the small artists a chance. I mean, a ton of people doing 30 copies of the KiTalbum is not going to make a ton of revenue. But who knows — maybe some of these artists will be the next big name.
Luysiane: Can you give me some ideas or inspiration about the kinds of things I could include in a KiTalbum if I wanted to make something like that, and maybe how other people have used it?
Ronny: Yeah, so the interesting thing for me when I discovered the format is that what I find almost surprising is that with all the possibilities that the format offers, the K-pop world has actually embraced this very conservatively. An album has X amount of tracks, X amount of pictures and videos uploaded to the product — and that's it.
But when I discovered what this format can do, I obviously thought of all the things you could do with it that are completely different. And it was interesting that no one in the K-pop world has really done it yet. For instance — as one of my projects a couple of years ago, I was the General Manager for Patreon for Europe — a lot of people are thinking about how can I fund my album production, how can I generate revenue to realize certain projects?
One of the things you could do, no one has done it yet, but you could actually sell the KiTalbum almost empty. You could sell the product and have maybe a video greeting where you're explaining what your concept is, what you're trying to do. You sell this to people and you say: I'm working on my album now, and every time I finish a track, I'm going to upload it to the platform until the album is complete. You're using the sale of this, and it's technically the same concept as Kickstarter, but at Kickstarter you kind of have to wait until something is finished, which sometimes takes 2 years. Here you can basically already sell the physical product. Of course you need artwork, some pictures, something to fill it, but the music itself, the videos may not be complete, or maybe it's one track or a few demos. And then you can sell this and use it as a possibility to fund the album.
Or think of your touring artist. Since you have to do 30 minimum production, if you have an audience of at least 100, you could do 30 KiTalbums for each show that you play. You could sell it at the show as like "XYZ Live in Berlin." And people could actually take this home. Then a few days later, once you've had the possibility to edit the pictures and the audio recording, you upload it and then people would be able to have an actual item from that particular show.
There were concepts like this on a bigger scale. I remember Einstürzende Neubauten did it a few years ago, but then you have to wait an hour or so after the concert and then you get a CD-R or something. Or bigger bands like Depeche Mode or U2 did it with massive trucks outside of stadiums. But this is the first time a small band can really do this. You could technically do one for each gig of the tour and then you have a unique product that people can take home.
There's also the option: let's say you're doing the album, you release it, and now the ticket sales start. You could upload a video and just say: hey, in two months the ticket sales start, here's a special link just for everyone who bought the album. If you click this link you'll have early access to tickets. Or exclusive things just for people who bought the KiTalbum.
Luysiane: And also — you mentioned that you just have to sell 10, for example, to break even.
Ronny: Obviously you don't want to use this as a reason to create a lot of waste, but it just helps knowing: I only need to sell 10 to recoup the costs of the 30. And the production time only takes a week, and then it needs to be shipped from Korea — that might take another three to five days usually. But if you've been too conservative and you only ordered the minimum to be safe, but then you find out you actually need more, it's really easy to order another 30. You have them within a week or two, which I think most people who order a product would be willing to wait. It's not like months. Luckily we're in better times now, but there used to be times where it was months. Now I think you're down to maybe four to six weeks for vinyl. The KiTalbum is definitely the fastest you can get a physical product.
Luysiane: Do you have any kind of affiliate setup so that people can help spread the idea and also make a little money from that?
Ronny: Yeah, there's no public affiliate program, but there are things that we do. I have a long-standing relationship with Handle with Care, one of the best manufacturing brokers in the world — they've really been a substantial part of this industry. So it was very important for me to let them know about the format. And Till Lindemann, the singer of Rammstein — he produced a KiTalbum, and the label produced everything through Handle with Care. There are programs where they get a certain cut of it. So I would say if anyone wants to talk about this, just get in touch with me. You can share my email address, and then people can just reach out.
And other than that, the whole production process is fairly easy because it's just KiTbetter.com and everybody can create an account and do the whole production, upload the assets, and do everything themselves. That's the self-serve side. Obviously when Seventeen or Blackpink do it, they don't use KiTbetter.com — they get in touch with our company directly, and that's possible. I'm happy to help. But if you want to, it's a self-serve thing — you just create an account on KiTbetter.com, either an artist account or a label account, and then you can upload all the assets and start the whole process.
Luysiane: It's an interesting concept. I was thinking about maybe making it customizable for the consumer — so let's say, like the Labubu where everybody could have a special version they bought. What do you think — is that a good idea?
Ronny: It could be a concept where the consumer customizes it — I don't know, maybe with their colors and pictures. And it technically is possible because the production in Korea is completely automated. And actually what we've been talking about is the minimum production quantity when you actually want to have products yourself. But there is also a way through KiTbetter where all you do is upload all the content to the site and the user can buy it at the KiTbetter online shop and it's going to get produced on demand. In that case, I don't have any risk because I just upload it there, and then if someone orders it, it gets produced and shipped. No upfront cost.
But I still live in a world where most artists actually like to have some copies for themselves — that's why I mentioned the 30 minimum quantity. But there's also this other way where you don't have to produce any, and then if people order from the KiTbetter store, it gets sent. And since it's produced on demand, technically speaking what you described could be possible in the future — because on demand, for each order, you could produce that one KiTalbum and send it out. It is not really part of the concept now, but technically it wouldn't be completely impossible.
Luysiane: Especially in the K-pop world, fans are like: we need to have our biases and stuff.
Ronny: And that is one concept that is happening a lot — when you see these big KiTalbum productions in K-pop, the content, the actual physical photo cards, etc., they differ. You might have different sets of photo cards across all the different boxes. Now I don't know if the members of Rammstein would want to do this, but you could technically do different runs of KiTalbums where the only thing that's different is the different photo cards.
For groups I think it's a balance- For solo singers, you could still have differential pictures. I mean, my son is really into Pokémon and he's collecting Pokémon cards — it's essentially kind of like a similar concept. In this concept you would have to do at least 30 of each variation, but you could technically do it. And then randomly mix it. In the K-pop world, often when you go to big online platforms and you order them, you either have the concept of specifically ordering a specific edition, or you have a randomly selected kind of thing where you don't know what you're getting.
Luysiane: Also — one last question — do you buy just one and then it uploads and uploads, or for every album do you have to buy a new KiT?
Ronny: I would never ever recommend anyone to basically buy one KiTalbum for your whole career and upload all your albums. To me, this is a closed concept — it's for one album. Yes, you could technically do it. Sometimes I have these conversations: "Oh great, I could do a KiTalbum for all my 10 albums and 20 EPs." And I'm like — you could, but why would you? There is an accepted price point for a KiTalbum, which is somewhere between 20 and 30 euros. Why would you give your whole life's work of music for that price? You could — if you want to go ahead and do it. But it is not something I would do.
But there are things that make sense — anything conceptually that is part of the life cycle of a product, whether it's an EP, a live album, an artist album — there's always things related to that one project, and that for me makes sense to upload. But when you're working on your next project, I wouldn't include it.
Luysiane: Yeah, definitely. OK, thank you so much.
Ronny: Yeah, of course
Luysiane: Very interesting concept, very interesting conversation. Thank you so much for that. We'll put your information out there, so if anyone wants to reach out, they can find your contact information.
Are you a label or artist interested in finding out more about how to use the KiTalbum for your music? Get in touch with Ronny Krieger below!
ronny.krieger@muzlive.com
KiTbetter.com
Ronny Krieger from KITBetter was interviewed by up and coming independent pop artist Luysiane for indieBerlin at the Ocular Online offices.
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