I don’t know if anyone will care about this, but it is exciting to me, so I am gonna talk about KOMCA numbers on signed albums, how they can be useful, and my recent experience with it for a bit!
So what is a KOMCA number? KOMCA stands for Korean Music Copyright Association, and they’re the ones that authenticate Kpop (and other Korean artists’ albums) with the little holographic stickers on the back of most of them. The KOMCA number is the unique number on each of these stickers, and no album has the same one. When a batch of albums is printed, these stickers are put on them consecutively as the albums are packed to get sent off to be shrink wrapped. This means that, until the packaging process is finished, there are boxes of consecutive numbered albums.
Now, this plays into signed albums in a potentially big way. Artists get sent boxes of printed, but not packaged, albums to sign. Since I am using my B.A.P albums for example here, this means that TS would get several boxes of albums to give to the group, and they would begin signing, and a lot of those albums would be consecutive. Not all, because it is not guaranteed that, say, the box with numbers 0016700-0017200 wouldn’t be sent along with the box of 0101000-0101500 for signing, resulting in highly variant sets of consecutive numbers.
Now, though this means that you can’t *disprove* the authenticity of a signature via KOMCA number, you absolutely *can* infer that KOMCA numbers from signed albums that are extremely close to the numbers of ones that are known to be legitimate are more likely to be real.
Okay, so chances are, for most collectors, you either know where the album comes from already, have no access to a confirmed legit signed one, it isn’t a close number, or you know your artist’s sigs well enough to determine authenticity by sight, so this may seem like it is of limited use for practical application. BUT it does come in handy sometimes, like it did for me today.
I collect B.A.P to completion. This means that I collect every version of every album, as well as all and individually signed albums and promos. That being said, I am also very careful about it, and have become intimately acquainted with their signatures and how they have evolved over the years. So after I had collected all 5 individually signed One Shot albums from their 2013 tour (no Himchan signed ones, because poor bby’s hand was broken), which were signed in black, I started taking a closer look at these silver signed ones I had seen very rarely floating around. The signatures very definitely look like legitimate signatures from that era, however, though they have been known to sign in different colors for different places (most notable being the First Sensibility albums which were signed in black for the US tour and gold for the Singapore tour), I have been unable to locate a source as to where they may have signed these ones in different colors. I debated for a while, but eventually decided to take the risk and order a Yongguk signed one that I found on Mercari (a Japanese resale site) and a Zelo that I found on Bunjang (a Korean resale site). When I got them, I compared KOMCA numbers, and this is what I found:
So what we see here are two KOMCA batch numbers, on albums from two different sellers from two different countries, both with signatures that are consistent and accurate for the time period they were signed, and that are only off by 282 numbers. What this says to me is that, in order for them to be faked signatures, the person that forged them would have had to have done several things. First, because stores rarely end up with consecutively, or close to consecutively, numbered albums, the forger would have had to have searched for close numbers. This is a nearly impossible task, requiring visiting potentially dozens of physical stores to check hundreds of albums (as one would need to be in person to compare numbers before buying), and something I think is unlikely someone looking to make a quick buck from forging a kpop idol signature would take the time to do. Next, they would have to be intimately familiar with both Yongguk and Zelo’s time-period current signatures, and proficient in confidently signing them so that they had the right pen pressure variance and no hesitation showing in the pen strokes. Next, these albums would have had to have been distributed well enough that sellers in two different countries would end up with these two incredibly close numbers. And none of this takes into account the other silver signed albums I have seen over the years, nor the fact that almost nobody even glances at KOMCA numbers, much less tracks them the way I do. All of this points to it being far more likely that, while signing, Yongguk and Zelo simply pulled an album each out of the same box to sign.
It is in this way that KOMCA numbers can really help put your mind at rest if you need reassurance on risky buys. These two albums are now literally the closest two KOMCA numbers I have encountered on multiple copies of the same album, even in the more than 6 years I have collected Kpop, and little things like this are so exciting to discover for me! I definitely ascribe by the idea that, for collectors, more information is never a bad thing, even if you don’t like what that information tells you, because chances are it will keep teaching you how to improve your hobby.