Jamie Krutz and Mark King at a COMBO booth!
By Shaad D’Souza | My awareness that music merchandise could be cool began, fittingly, with Kanye West. During the Melbourne stop of his Yeezus tour In 2013, Kanye installed a pop-up in the city where you could buy a limited variant of his controversial, Wes Lang-designed merch. I skipped school to pick up a shirt, but there was no discernable queue and seemingly very little interest in the store itself. Three years later, he installed another merch pop-up in Melbourne for the tour behind The Life of Pablo; this time there was an eight-hour queue to get into the store.
Since then, merch has become a mammoth part of popular culture. Merch can make or break album-sales records, fund the careers of emerging artists, and be resold for hundreds or thousands of dollars. It’s strange, but oddly fitting, that one of the most defining aspects of music in 2019 isn’t really about music at all, and for better or for worse, merch is no longer just merch. The global music merchandise market was worth $3.1 billion in 2016, partially because selling records isn’t really a viable option to make heaps of cash anymore — but also because it’s not the most viable option for significant chart placements anymore.
High chart placement is still an indicator of clout and fame, and over the past few years pop musicians realized that the best way to juice their numbers was to bundle albums with exclusive merchandise. Even if the number of people who buy physical music product has dwindled, there are scores of ravenous teens out there who can’t live without a new Travis Scott or Ariana Grande t-shirt. Bundle a digital copy of an album with a must-have streetwear item, and you’ve got higher first-week numbers than what artists were racking up a few years ago.
Naturally, artists have found a way to exploit this.. .
Read the full article here for some important advice:
https://www.thefader.com/2019/08/21/will-merch-save-or-doom-the-music-industry