Modern Merchandising

For many bands/artists, “merchandising” is a significant source of income. What is “merchandising” I hear you ask. Merchandising simply means the selling of products other than your music. T-Shirts, posters, stickers, caps etc. We’ve all been to a concert where the T-shirt line was longer than the line to get into the gig so how how do we cash in on this?

Traditionally merchandising has been an expensive thing to set up so many bands simply don’t bother. It can cost a lot of money to have a stack of T-Shirts or caps printed in various sizes, colours etc and you are probably going to need to sell a lot to even break square, let alone making a profit. Once again, modern technology and the internet has come to our rescue.

Full list of sections in this chapter:

• Merchandising with CafePress
  

  In this article we are going to look at “Print on demand” services, specifically Cafe Press. There are many companies offering this service now but Cafe Press is the best known example. Print on demand means exactly that. When a customer wants a shirt with your bands logo on it, they can simply order and [...]

• Merchandising with Createspace
  

  Createspace is another “on demand” self-publishing service similar to CafePress. This one is run by internet giants Amazon. On Demand simply means that you don’t buy a whole pile of your product up front. They make each product when they get an order so your up-front costs are absolutley minimised. They do a smaller range [...]