Collecting visual-kei can be confusing and overwhelming when you first get into it. This page offers some tips and tricks if you’re trying to get into collecting.
Where to buy visual-kei?
The greatest place to find and buy visual-kei is, of course, its homeland, Japan. It is filled to the brim with used CD shops such as puresound, surugaya, FLOWER RECORD, and many bookoffs. Sadly, a plane ticket to Japan is quite overkill just for buying VK. The internet is the solution then, right? It is, but it can be difficult to find the right places to do it.
By first instinct, most people will look on eBay, Discogs, or Vinted to buy visual-kei. There’s a huge problem though, Western resellers charge at least the double the value, and in some cases five times more money than what the item is actually worth. Big scam??? Well, you might think so, but let’s look at the other way first.
There is another way to buy visual-kei: Buying from Japanese websites like mercari JP, Yahoo Auctions JP and Rakuten using a shopping service such as ZenMarket, buyee, FromJapan and others. But there is a catch… These shopping services all demand service fees per item, often 500JPY or more per item, they charge shipping fees in Japan too, and then there’s a second shipping fees from their warehouse to you, and if you’re in Europe, expect astronomical import costs from Japan.
I’d say it’s cheaper to buy from a reseller in your own continent when you buy one or two items. Because even with such an inflated item value, it still ends up cheaper than ordering from Japan due the extra costs and fees that come with that. But when you buy a whole lot of items, it’s cheaper from Japan directly.
Note: Yahoo Auctions Japan is blocked in the EU, but I recommend FromJapan’s search engine the most to look items up on there as a kind of proxy if you’re in the EU.
Keep track of the collection?
I myself have a super-detailed Excel to keep track of my collection. But if there’s a site I cannot recommend enough when it comes to archiving visual-kei, and keeping track of the collection, it’s vk.gy. It’s a huge VK library that has the most info out of any history database on the scene ever. It’s crazy what John, the owner cooked up there!
Links to Japanese Shopping Sites:
Yahoo Auctions JP (Blocked in the EU!)
Links to Shopping Services:
Demo Tapes: REAL or FAKE?
One of the most controversial and annoying parts about visual-kei collecting are the sheer amount of fake demo tapes that exist and are circulating on the market. But is it really that big of a problem? And if you see a demo tape you want, how do you know it’s real or fake? In the following article (in creation), I explain every single bit of information I know, and every technique I use to make a smart purchase when I see a demo tape on sale. While you can never 100% know it’s real, sometimes you can get really really close.