Band Merchandising

August 13th, 2009 • Music

If you’re the sort of band who want to make more money and don’t mind doing it through the sale of merchandise, this might be interesting.

Why should I sell merchandise?

If done properly, selling your bands merchandise at shows and from online stores will increase your earnings, so more to you for making music. Simple.

At your shows, no one in the audience is forced to buy your merchandise so don’t feel like it’s an uncool thing to do. Every great artists has sold merchandise. Your MP3′s, CD’s and Vinyl are merchandise; so don’t get all-prissy about t-shirts, hats, hoodies and gimmicks, because it’s all part of the same tree.

It’s more important to sell merchandise in the current music climate than it ever has been. If you’re a band who wants to earn a living from the music industry and have any ounce of sense, you’ll get your business head on and do some selling.

The rules of selling merchandise.

Only sell merchandise if you have people to sell it too. If you’re doing 4 shows a month and the crowd is no bigger than 10 people a show, you should probably concentrate on fixing that problem (i.e. getting ticket sales up!) before you start the merchandise trail. For many touring bands merchandise is the second biggest revenue stream after ticket sales, so get ticket sales up, then sell your merchandise. This way, there are more people in the crowd to buy your merchandise.

You also have to check with the promoter and/or venue to makes sure it’s okay to set up a stall somewhere in the venue. If your only selling limited items on a small scale, don’t worry about it, just let the crowd know you’re selling merchandise at the end of your show and get all your merchandise stuff out of a bag. Make the bag cool; otherwise you’re just a band selling things out of a bag. For example, don’t pull a £10 CD out of a bin bag.

How much merchandise should I buy to sell?

This is a tough question and one that should be carefully addressed. I bounced back some ideas on twitter and got back the following results.

@groovegenerator I heard tell of expected sale rates of 1 in 3 if the audience came to see named band, much less for support tho

@groovegenerator If it’s a big name with hardcore following. Affected by loads of things: age, demographic, age of band

Sounds positive, but you must take onboard the following:

How popular is your band as a brand? Will people want to buy into your brand, because make no mistake; your band is a brand. Also, take into account demographic; for example, if the average age of your audience is 16 to 20 you’re likely to sell hoodies, if they’re 30 to 40, you’ll probably a lot less hoodies, but you my sell more mugs. So what I’m saying is, sell the right product to the right audience.

I also got a good warning from @indielab on quantities of merchandise.

@indielab Not sure how many for an established act but I’ve certainly lost a LOT of £ before by over estimating the demand for clothing merch

@indielab [...] we had all our money tied up in endless boxes of t-shirts! My advice – v. small run ltd editions

So make sure you only order what you think is necessary. At the early stages it certainly better to be under stocked than over stocked. At least when you run out of merchandise you’ll know the demand for your product and next time can order more. The alternative is to spend all your hard earned cash on boxes of merchandise that will never sell, no beer money for you sir.

The process involved in purchasing & designing merchandise.

You have three options.

Option 1) You can either make your own merchandise, which is a good idea if you’re really skint, or know there’s not enough demand to justify getting products professionally produced. For advice on this I suggest you check out this video:

Option 2) Get merchandise professionally made. If you’re going to do this, make sure you get at least 3 quotes from different companies and make sure you’re happy with the level of quality they’re producing. After all, the last thing you want is to spend your hard earned cash on merchandise which once received turns out to be a box of rubbish (not good for you or your customers). There are other considerations – for example, with t-shirts, you’ll probably need to supply artwork and specify how many colours for the print. More colours = more expense. There’s also normally a set up fee, so check for these hidden costs when getting your quotes no matter what the product.

Option 3) If you’re big and established enough, you can hire a team to front the costs by ordering the merchandise and selling it for you. If you go this route, expect to earn less because the merchandise team will take a considerable cut of the profits as they’ve taken the money risk and done the legwork.

If you do merchandise properly you can expect good return. If you do it badly, you’ll  lose confidence from fans, lose money and look a muppet. So do it properly.

For all your Merchandising needs have a look at:

Tags: band, Business, earnings, estimating, gimmicks, hoodies, industry, marketing, merchandise, merchandising, mugs, Music, online, purchasing, quantities, sales, sell, shows. demographic, stores, t-shirts, tshirts, twitter

Trackback URI.