What COLORS and RCA Records can teach us about music merch campaigns
|MC_PREVIEW_TEXT|
View this email in your browser (|ARCHIVE|) http://hotpodnews.com/presents.... A Newsletter about Big Ideas in Music and Technology, by Cherie Hu This is issue #67, published on October 21, 2019 Happy Monday!
Last week was jam-packed for me, but so rewarding and fun. On Wednesday, I participated in a one-on-one conversation with Jeremy Erlich — Head of Music Strategy at Spotify, and former CFO at Interscope Records — at a private offsite event for Spotify’s creator team in Austin, TX. It was especially interesting to hear Jeremy’s perspective on the current state of major labels and record deals in the streaming era, and to exchange thoughts on how the remaining inefficiencies in the marketing and monetization of mainstream music could potentially be addressed. Also, it wasn’t so much a fireside chat as it was farm-side, as we were surrounded by alpacas and longhorns (https://www.instagram.com/p/B3sXO_tno7x/) .
The following day, I had the honor of giving a talk at Northeastern University (https://camd.northeastern.edu/event/leading-voices-speaker-series-cherie-hu/) about international music-tech trends, with a focus on how developments in the Asian entertainment and tech industries have ushered in a new kind of “music influencer” economy. Special thank-you to Rebekah Moore (https://camd.northeastern.edu/faculty/rebekah-e-moore/) for inviting me, and to all the students and faculty in the room for being so engaged and asking excellent questions.
If you’re interested in looking at the full transcript and slides of my talk (I rarely write scripts for solo talks ahead of time, but did so this time around because I had so many scatterbrained thoughts on the topic, and needed to flesh them out on paper), I’ll be dropping them this week on my Patreon page for $7+/month members. You can join as a paying member by clicking here (patreon.com/cheriehu) .
As always, thank you so much for reading, following and supporting! Now onward… What COLORS and RCA Records can teach us about music merch campaigns
The lowdown: * Two separate merch campaigns from Sony Music’s RCA Records and music-curation and performance brand COLORS show us just how much room there is for experimentation in the music merch sector. * Incumbent practices around what, when and why to launch merch for an artist can and should evolve — with several lessons from the fashion industry itself.
In today’s music industry, merch is a double-edged sword.
At its best, merch serves as a platform for artists and fans to express themselves visually (https://www.gq.com/story/vampire-weekend-merch) and identify collectively with a musical aesthetic, social movement and/or general way of life, while directly funding said artists’ performing and touring careers. At its worst, or perhaps just most annoying, it becomes just another manipulative marketing checkbox to drive up sales (https://www.stereogum.com/2061620/superm-summer-walker-billboard-charts/franchises/the-week-in-pop/) and chart rankings — bundled with recorded music in a way that, ironically, often drives down the value (https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/album-merch-bundles-dont-make-much-money-but-rappers-like-them-anyway-776067/) of both products.
Either way, it’s becoming an important income stream both for the music industry and for individual artists. As of 2016 (https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/56nG2R2ps7YJCDyG76Wjbvf/more-than-merch-why-band-t-shirts-are-so-important) , the size of the music merch market is roughly 65% that of the live-concert market (measured in terms of ticket sales) — a percentage that is likely to continue to grow not just as album-merch bundles become more mainstream, but also as media platforms like YouTube (https://techcrunch.com/2019/10/16/youtube-partners-with-merchbar-to-sell-music-artists-swag-underneath-videos/) and Instagram (https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/instagrams-new-e-commerce-features-could-transform-music-marketing-but-only-if-the-record-industry-is-willing-to-change/) make it easier for fans to find their favorite artists’ official merch online, independent of any album release cycle.
However, it seems to me that the music-merch sector hasn’t yet reflected the widespread, fast-moving technological change in the fashion and ecommerce industries at large. Usually, because most artists prioritize recording and touring in their careers, merch is typically viewed as a secondary marketing add-on, a necessary logistical lift to help drive sales in those former two revenue streams. Make a 24/7 store available on your artist website, set up a merch booth at your show, slap the latest album’s cover art or the artist’s face or name onto the merch, maybe make limited runs so they sell out quickly — that’s it.
What I want to highlight in this week’s newsletter are two music merch initiatives from the past month that break at least one of these rules. How do you get people excited about merch if the artist isn’t on tour or doesn’t have any new music out? How can you potentially personalize each item to the customer and involve them more in the design, production and marketing process? How can you run a music merch store like a proper fashion brand?
Below, I share some of my original findings from the two campaigns, followed by a summary of what I think are the most interesting takeaways when it comes to opportunities for experimentation in music merch strategies. I would love to hear your thoughts and feedback on this issue — you can reply to this email and it’ll go straight to me! The campaigns
** Bring Me The Horizon + RCA Records: “Amo in Colour”
Last Monday (Oct. 14), U.K. rock band Bring Me The Horizon (https://www.bmthofficial.com/#) and their label, Sony Music’s RCA Records, announced a new merch campaign titled “amo in colour (http://amoincolour.com/) ,” which claims to create a customized shirt for each fan by analyzing their streaming habits around the band’s latest album amo (https://open.spotify.com/album/04mkS7FooK8fRbB626T9NR?si=zZ7W2AXcTkKZ6zaBstRyow) .
Upon visiting the campaign’s official site — which was designed by Phantom (https://phantom.land/about) — fans are asked either to sync their Spotify accounts or to provide their email and date of birth manually, then pick their top six favorite songs from the amo album. (I personally had never heard of the band before, so just picked six random songs that I thought had interesting titles.)
According to the site’s copy, what it does afterwards is analyze your streaming behavior and/or your personal selection of songs, and then “serve you an exclusive tee design that only Bring Me fans with the same streaming behavior as you can access.”
There are a total of ten different possible colors — including but not limited to yellow (“you’re in great company; your listening behavior is in common with a large group of BMTH fans who share access to this tee”), dark purple (“you show some rare listening behaviors, but also share attributes with the larger group of BMTH fans”) and the color I got, pink (“yoυ’re part of one of the most-rare groups of listeners; there’s a very limited number of BMTH fans who have access to this tee”).
Of course, you then have the option to preorder your personalized shirt from Bring Me The Horizon’s online store for £15 (delivery begins on October 28). The algorithm gave me pink.
What’s interesting to me about this rollout is that it doesn’t actually have any new music or tour announcements associated with it. amo came out nine months ago, in January 2019, while the six-pointed star shape is connected to the visuals from one of Bring Me The Horizon’s lyric videos (“mother tongue (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-aC_TSkGvPw) ”), which was also released in January.
The band has had some recent press announcements related to gaming: a song from amo will be featured in the upcoming WWE 2K20 soundtrack (https://wwe.2k.com/news/wwe-2k20-in-game-soundtrack/) , and the band composed a new original song for the Death Stranding soundtrack (https://www.billboard.com/articles/news/dance/8531812/death-stranding-timefall-video-game-soundtrack-track-list) , which will be released on November 7. But neither game has visuals that could be connected in any way to the “amo in colour” merch.
All of this implies to me that “amo in colour” is intended to invigorate existing fans’ engagement with the band’s catalog several months after the fact, instead of hyping any specific new release. Demanding that fans choose specific songs from amo before receiving their customized design might be an underhanded, digital take on the ever-controversial “album-merch bundle (https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/album-merch-bundles-dont-make-much-money-but-rappers-like-them-anyway-776067/) ,” in terms of bringing the two revenue streams more closely together.
But there’s also a fundamental flaw in the campaign’s implementation: I found out that you don’t actually have to “unlock” any of these shirts in order to access them.
While none of the “amo in colour” shirts are listed on BMTH’s homepage, fans can access all ten versions of the shirt by visiting the URL store.bmthofficial.com/collections/all, which features all of the store’s listed and unlisted products. In other words, even if the “algorithm” found that you had “rare listening behaviors” and assigned you a dark purple shirt, but you hated the color purple, you could just go to the above link and buy a blue shirt instead.
Most fans probably won’t notice this workaround. But it suggests that site visitors won’t actually get customizations so much as they’ll get assigned to the best approximation, out of a limited selection of ten possibilities. And while streaming personalization might be a cool aspect of the fan journey in this campaign, it’s certainly not necessary to drive a transaction. (Sony Music / RCA declined to comment for this piece.)
** COLORS + Mahalia + Celeste: “Strangers to Lovers” and “Love and Compromise”
Many of you probably know already about COLORS (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2Qw1dzXDBAZPwS7zm37g8g) — the minimalist platform that has taken YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2Qw1dzXDBAZPwS7zm37g8g) and the wider music industry by storm for its track record of showcasing the world’s most distinct and high-quality music talent, often before or right as artists are about to break. The company has recently been taking interesting steps to diversify its business and brand beyond videos alone, most recently with physical merch.
On Sept. 21, COLORS dropped its first-ever merch collaboration (https://www.facebook.com/celeste/posts/2329315407194644) with U.K.-based singer Celeste — titled “Strangers to Lovers (https://shop.colorsxstudios.com/products/celeste-strangers-to-lovers?variant=18651265073203) ,” and inspired by Celeste’s COLORS performance of her single “Strange” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ZbO3pq9qq4) from a few weeks earlier.
The second COLORS merch item dropped on Oct. 1 in collaboration with another U.K. artist Mahalia, titled “Love and Compromise (https://shop.colorsxstudios.com/products/love-and-compromise-t-shirt-limited-edition) ” (after the artist’s latest album (https://open.spotify.com/album/6tbaSZ6Q72kofaJtscUwFA?si=KHZEQXHsSBW97xERbFbm1Q) ). This particular merch release went public just one day after the corresponding COLORS video (Mahalia’s “Hide Out” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GOFiGClu0uk) ), instead of being delayed by a few weeks.
Both merch items feature an exclusive graphic design on the back, plus the name of the artist and the date of their COLORS show on the front. Priced at €49 each, they also both sold out within just a few hours — and are already being spotted in the wild (https://twitter.com/totally_tyler/status/1185528554597093377?s=21) at the featured artists’ shows.
The merch is meant to be complementary rather than substitutional to artists’ existing ecommerce ventures. For instance, Mahalia already had her own merch store (https://eurostore.warnermusic.com/eu/artists/mahalia.html?ref=) , managed by Warner Music, before working with COLORS; Celeste, who signed to Polydor Records last year, will likely have her own store up soon as well.
A source tells me that COLORS eventually plans on dropping new merch biweekly (i.e. every other week), similarly tying each item to an individual video or artist. Generic, COLORS-branded merch is also on the way, but the focus seems to be on collaborating and co-branding directly with artists, which is unusual for a curation-driven company.
Merch is just one spoke in COLORS’ larger wheel of revenue and brand diversification beyond video — and, importantly, they always cut artists in on sales. The company has been distributing audio-only versions of many of its videos on Spotify (https://open.spotify.com/playlist/72cxf8xXRQOZiYbSJR71io?si=ycxl0EdJR-2z-y-Ej0huBA) and Apple Music (https://music.apple.com/gb/playlist/colors-all-shows/pl.3a5197a2bcb54a1eb9a8e34ff20d12d4) for over a year (the most recent one is Joel Culpepper’s “Woman (https://open.spotify.com/track/3LugIk9W4YaJAPXaUlS2yC?si=lN9FUQgeQZqpkt7Dwl_gnw) ,” released last Friday; the first, to my knowledge, was Lomepal’s “Tout lâcher (https://open.spotify.com/track/1J9mWBb7CIr8kZ2v47iHHe?si=LMLWIznkTxawkeN-BHMToQ) ” in May 2018).
Since February 2018, COLORS’ Instagram page (https://www.instagram.com/colorsxstudios/?hl=en) has also been posting autographed photos of each of its guest artists, with the hashtag #colorscollectoresedition (the first autograph in the series (https://www.instagram.com/p/BeqBmM5Ag3n/) was from U.K. rapper Flohio). In addition to the autograph, each photo includes the artist’s name, hometown and date their COLORS video was uploaded. The aesthetic is reminiscent of vintage, physical memorabilia, and seems to be an attempt from the brand to elicit a similar emotional response and connection with fans in a digital format. (A source says the company likely won’t make physical versions of #colorscollectoresedition posts available for sale, but it’s definitely a possibility.) The takeaways and possibilities
While these campaigns from COLORS and RCA Records are quite different from each other — in terms of musical and visual aesthetics and rollout tactics — the two combined nonetheless present a lot of interesting possibilities for how other artists and labels can think differently about their own merch strategies in the future.
I outline four such possibilities below:
** Dropping new merch more regularly, like a fashion brand
COLORS’ ambitions to release merch as often as biweekly marks an unconventional departure from how music merch traditionally works, and is actually more akin to the standard release cadence of fashion and lifestyle brands at large.
Sneaker companies have public release (https://www.nike.com/launch/) calendars (https://www.adidas.com/us/release-dates) where fans can get notified about when shoes go on sale; according to its calendar, Adidas alone has over a dozen new sneakers dropping over the next month. Other brands like Supreme — which also drops new products weekly, and has gotten national coverage of the cultish lines outside its stores (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/03/fashion/waiting-in-line-supreme-streetwear-merch.html) — leave most release tracking to self-organized community efforts (https://www.supremecommunity.com/season/fall-winter2019/droplists/) .
Admittedly, few artists have the concrete and/or abstract resources (time, money, energy, etc.) to invest in a merch line that updates so frequently. An organizational obstacle unique to the music industry is that it’s often the record labels who are handling artists’ merch, rather than the artists themselves, especially at the major-label level. As I mentioned at the start of this newsletter, this leads to treating merch as just a marketing checkbox on the way to selling more records or generating more streams — instead of treating merch stores as standalone fashion-ecommerce operations that could potentially compete with incumbent brands in and out of musice.
There are notable exceptions, of course — such as Rihanna (https://www.billboard.com/articles/business/8455343/rihanna-business-success-fenty-beauty-savage) , who runs not one but three different retail empires across Fenty Beauty, Savage x Fenty and the Fenty luxury house with LVMH, and who benefits from a solid team around her at Roc Nation to manage those ventures.
A more frequent merch release cadence also makes sense for a brand like COLORS that 1) is already releasing videos weekly at minimum, 2) has a consistent visual aesthetic even with its diversity of artist-guests and 3) faces a different kind of pressure — not to sell records, but to build a valuable curation brand that serious music fans will want to come back to on a regular basis.
** Limiting merch to events, instead of always keeping your store on
An important counterpart to the above is that releasing merch too often, or making it too available, might strip away the magical, exclusive appeal that attracts diehard fans in the first place.
One potential — and proven — solution is to strike a balance between cadence and availability. If you want to be a premium brand like Supreme while still releasing a new product every week, you have to limit supply such that each drop becomes a coveted event in and of itself.
This dynamic is nothing new in the world of merch booths on tour, where many artists opt to sell exclusive designs that are avaliable exclusively at shows rather than online. Replicating this hyped-up experience in a digital environment is a bit more difficult, but certainly not impossible.
Take COLORS, for example: speaking to me for this newsletter, a source suggested that “for many fans, watching a COLORS premiere is just as powerful and important as going to a show” — in part because of the intimacy that results from an individual artist performing with nothing but a microphone and a solid background to support them.
Importantly, this wasn’t always the case: COLORS used to release several videos per week, but its output has actually decreased over time, such that the average number of weekly uploads is only one to two. This helps turn each video into more of an event, and incorporating limited-edition merch further reinforces that emotional association with live concerts that viewers might consequently develop.
** Personalizing merch and incorporating user tastes into designs
Another potential method for creating a sense of exclusivity around a digital or physical product is to personalize the design or form factor to each individual customer.
In fact, even though the campaign execution is imperfect, “amo in colour” is one of the first attempts I’ve seen in the music merch world that strikes a balance between 1) artists’ and labels’ interests in terms of maintaining brand control and integrity, and 2) fans’ interests in creating and purchasing items that seem personalized and uniquely theirs.
That balance is the bane of many labels’ existence with respect to dealing with fan merch online, and with user-generated content (UGC) in general. As I’ve written in the past, there’s still a wide-open opportunity to embrace a pro-UGC mentality around fan-“uploaded” merch (https://www.patreon.com/posts/28198547) , in the same way that labels are gradually embracing online user-generated videos that incorporate their catalog. But because there’s no licensing and rights-management infrastructure for ecommerce in the same way that there’s Content ID for digital audio and video, labels still constantly have to spend hours per day issuing takedown requests for unauthorized merch on Etsy, RedBubble, Amazon and similar sites.
Bringing a streaming API into the fold is an intriguing way to address this issue. In the case of “amo in colour,” Bring Me The Horizon and RCA Records provide merely the blueprint — a minimal set of rules for creation, in this case the presence of their signature star — within which the final design can adapt to users’ profiles. Incidentally, this is the same approach that initiatives like Nike By You (https://www.nike.com/nike-by-you) already take in the fashion industry: the brand provides the classic blueprint, but everything else is up to the customer.
** Maximizing longevity by not tying merch to record releases
As I mentioned earlier, “amo in colour” is a good example of a campaign timed to revive fan excitement around older catalog, instead of building hype around a more recent release. This is an interesting contrast to COLORS’ approach, which ties each piece of merch directly to a brand-new video upload.
While no one approach is necessarily more valid than the other, it’s important to remember that an effective merch strategy — the kind that fans will race each other to cash in on — is often about visual branding and aesthetic consistency over time more than it is about hyping any one specific record or piece of content, which might die out in popularity by the following week anyway.
The “amo in colour” merch has some ties to Bring Me The Horizon’s previous videos; COLORS’ artist-collab merch is consistent in its formatting, particularly on the front of each shirt. But if your goal is not to limit the availability of your merch around a specific event, but rather to keep your online store active 24/7, then consistent visuals are even more of an imperative.
One of my favorite examples of this is Tierra Whack’s merch store (https://www.tierrawhackmerch.com/) — the visuals of which have practically nothing to do with her album art or music videos, but which are consistent with each other and subtle enough to wear as equal parts artist adulation and fashion statement.
This also frees up artists to release merch on a schedule that might not be related to their album rollouts at all. I would love to see a similar study to the one that I did a while ago for music videos (https://www.getrevue.co/profile/cheriehu42/issues/why-are-none-of-the-top-10-music-video-debuts-in-youtube-history-from-hip-hop-artists-173643) — i.e. analyzing at what point in a marketing campaign an artist decides to release a new merch product, relative to the release of an album or single.
My hypothesis is that the relationship between those two revenue streams has actually become more detached over time, as streaming and ecommerce have complicated what it means for any kind of product to have a “shelf life.” But that’s for another future newsletter. 🙂 🌊 ✨ If you’d like to support even more thoughts and conversations on music and tech, I encourage you to become a paying member of the Water & Music ecosystem on Patreon (http://patreon.com/cheriehu?utm_campaign=Water%20%26%20Music&utm_medium=email&utm_source=Revue%20newsletter) . For as little as $3/month or as much as $40+/month, you can access a wide range of perks including: * A closed, members-only Discord server * Exclusive essays * Previews and bonus material for my freelance articles * Monthly video hangouts with me
You’ll also be supporting the expansion of the Water & Music team as it continues to grow in the coming year. Thanks so much for reading! ✨ My writing elsewhere
Billboard (https://www.billboard.com/articles/business/streaming/8525688/tom-misch-streaming-spotify) — I wrote about what the music business can learn from Tom Misch’s streaming success, especially the power of back catalog and artist-curated playlists.
Hot Pod (https://hotpodnews.com/will-podcast-playlists-elevate-the-microcast/) — I wrote about how the rise of podcast playlists could bring “microcasts” (i.e. podcasts lasting <5 minutes per episode) into the mainstream, and how the music industry is already ahead of the curve with experimentation on this front.
Patreon — “Netflix Is Done With Niche (https://www.patreon.com/posts/30749797) .” I wrote a brief analysis on the first four episodes of Netflix’s new hip-hop competition Rhythm + Flow, and what they reveal about Netflix’s ambitions to go mainstream and to serve as their own critics. What I’m listening to
Just one song for this issue, but a powerful one: “El Niño (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sURzCmpI2qg) ” by French-Afropean funk duo DjeuhDjoah & Lieutenant Nicholson (https://hotcasarecords.bandcamp.com/album/aimez-ces-airs) is probably the funkiest song about global warming that has ever been made. Epilogue
I’m working on a longform piece about the downsides of gamification in the music and entertainment industries; after doing deeper research, I have lots of my own thoughts on this topic, but would love to hear yours as well. What do you think we stand to lose, not just gain, when the music we love just turns into a game? Simply reply to this email and it’ll go straight to me!
============================================================ Twitter (https://twitter.com/cheriehu42) Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/cheriehu42) Website (https://cheriehu.com) Email (mailto:cherie@cheriehu.com) Spotify (https://open.spotify.com/user/121407986?si=0BQCICqdRF-LPwZ1grf6jA) Medium (https://medium.com/@cheriehu42) LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/cheriehu/) Instagram (https://instagram.com/cheriehu42) Copyright © |CURRENT_YEAR| |LIST:COMPANY|, All rights reserved. |IFNOT:ARCHIVE_PAGE| |LIST:DESCRIPTION|
Our mailing address is: |LIST_ADDRESS| |END:IF|
Want to change how you receive these emails? You can update your preferences (|UPDATE_PROFILE|) or unsubscribe from this list (|UNSUB|) .
|IF:REWARDS| |REWARDS_TEXT| |END:IF|