I asked in another thread about Korean Blu-ray shops and unexpectedly I was able to go to Korea with my partner so I was able to do my own shopping (probably made everyone's life easier, hah). Posting this here because it's interesting to compare the state of physical media in Korea vs. here in the U.S.
I couldn't find any reporting that addressed what I was looking for, so most of my initial research took me to comments made by Korean locals who painted a bleak picture - more than a few said that most stores specializing in movies had gone out of business ages ago due to the changing market and that I was better off shopping online. It seemed especially dire to hear this from a few Koreans who still bought Blu-rays.
Then it finally occurred to me search "best Blu-ray store Korea" on YouTube and I found
this. A very thorough video, wouldn't surprise me if Tyler was a member here (and likely at the other forums). I found
another video where he visits a book store, Aladin, but I had to skip it due to time constraints.
The store, "Apple Music" in English, is on the second floor of a mall that was only four bus stops away from our place in Mapo. (I think 15 minutes total?) That mall is basically a Mecca for electronics, you can find probably the best models of anything you want there, like super-charged massage chairs and kitchen appliances. The second floor is mostly an audiophile paradise - I've never seen anything like it where it's one store after another of audiophile gear (so many vacuum tubes!) They took up most of the second floor, leaving only a few stores like Apple Music that deal with physical media, and the inventory at these stores leaned heavily on jazz and classical music. It's likely jazz and classical records sell far more units in Korea than in the U.S., similar to how it is in Japan. When I went into Apple Music, I was surprised to find that it imported a lot of audiophile pressings from the U.S., even super expensive stuff like MFSL's "one-step" reissues. But the store stands out mostly for its amazing movie inventory, all the more impressive when the floor space is far less than, say, Amoeba in Hollywood. A lot of DVD's - they even had a healthy stock of Abbas Kiarostami box sets! - but I focused on Blu-rays and UHD's. The woman who ran it is very knowledgeable and very helpful, even with the language barrier. I asked about one Edward Yang movie without mentioning Yang's name and she immediately reached over and grabbed a stack of Edward Yang movies that had everything I'd want from him. FYI, you can get your 10% in sales tax back at the airport, and it's actually a fast process in Korea thanks to the way it's set up, but I neglected to save my receipt. (Sometimes if you show a non-Korean passport, a store will remove the tax right there on the spot.)
Anyway, that same woman comments on the YouTube video and thanks Tyler, mentioning that people from all over the world have visited her store after seeing his video (like me!) It's also pointed out elsewhere that the store is very much a rarity, one that stocks a lot of arthouse fare. (She basically had everything I asked for - the only exceptions were a few titles that were no longer in-print.)
Later on when we went to Kyobo Book Centre, something of a landmark since it's the largest book store in Korea, they had a setup similar to Barnes & Noble where there's a section that specializes in music and films. However, the film selection was pretty modest and made up of big mainstream titles. On top of that, it was suggested that when you manage to find stores like the one we saw in Kyobo, it's really propped up by K-pop sales - a lot of K-pop fans in Asia will not only buy the physical albums but multiple versions (or variations) of it, and it's possible that's the main source of revenue for less-specialized movie & music stores in Korea when they do exist.
