Japanese messaging app Line has always made a big thing of its animated characters, which are used as ‘stickers’ in its users’ conversations, as well as appearing in mobile games, merchandise and cartoons.
Now the company is working with one of the biggest K-Pop bands, BTS, on their own range of characters. BT21 are eight characters ‘designed’ by the band, and made available through Line’s range of apps on 26 September.
A couple of recent independent-music conferences has reminded us how important merchandise is as an income stream for artists in the modern industry.
Now a new report from the Licensing Industry Merchandisers Association (LIMA) has put some figures on that. It claims that global music merch sales grew by 9.4% to $3.1bn in 2016.
“Music is part of the culture, and people shopping for [music related merchandise] are not limited to the music fans per se,” LIMA SVP Marty Brochstein told Billboard. “Brick and mortar is taking the music category much more seriously.”
The number of people signing up to Bandcamp quadrupled after it dropped its requirement for people to make a purchase before they could get a ‘fan account’ on the music site.
Until recently, the restriction meant that visitors to Bandcamp without one of those accounts were unable to use community features like following and wishlists.
“There was a good reason for creating it like this: to make sure the quality of the community was very high. The thinking was ‘hey, if you’re a buyer, you’re committed and engaged’. It’s not just someone liking every post on Facebook or Instagram,” Bandcamp COO Joshua Kim told Music Ally.
“Someone who put their money down to support an artist is serious about music, and that was who we wanted in our community. And that model has managed to grow our fan community to become huge and very robust.”
From signed CDs and topical t-shirts to snapbacks and fire-starting jigsaw puzzles, merchandise is a vital income stream for independent artists.
How to make the most of it? A panel at AIM’s Indie-Con conference in London this week offered advice and anecdotes from a panel of marketers and managers.
It included Iris Gomez from Raw Power Management; Kevin Douch from Big Scary Monsters; Gabrielle Nicot-Berenger from Music Glue; David Riley from Plan It Music; Achal Dhillon from Killing Moon; and Cimone Fagan from Hospital Records.
The moderator was Absolute Radio’s Danielle Perry. Here’s our roundup of some of the most useful advice from the session.
Universal Music Group has secured its second deal with the Prince estate in a matter of months.
In November, Universal Music Publishing Group was revealed as the global administrator of the late star’s publishing catalogue, and now UMG’s Bravado division will handle branding and licensing for Prince.
Music Ally was one of the first publications to write about Sidestep when it launched in September 2013 as a way for fans to browse and buy concert merch before attending a gig.
We’re not its only admirers though: after working with the startup on her Formation tour, Beyoncé and her company Parkwood Entertainment have invested $150k in the company.
That’s part of a wider $1.7m of funding for Sidestep, with other investors including Troy Carter and actor Jared Leto. The company has sold merch for Guns’n’Roses, Fall Out Boy, Selena Gomez and Weezer among other artists, taking a 10% cut of sales.
The Opus Play app launched quietly for iOS earlier this year, and offers an interesting spin on persuading fans to buy physical merchandise for artists they like.
“Merchandise that is Opus-enabled comes with a unique Opus Code that can be redeemed on the Opus site, instantly unlocking content on the app,” explains its AngelList listing.
UDiscoverMusic is the new D2C site set up by Universal Music to exploit its considerable catalogue division, with an emphasis not just on high-ticket boxset but also on discovery and contextual analysis of the artists in its archives.
We’ve seen plenty of startups with platforms for creating apps for artists, but not so many focused on festivals and other music events. SecondScreen is exactly that, with the UK-based startup having launched its first app last week for the Isle of Wight Festival
When YouTube bought BandPage earlier this year, we wondered what it would mean for the latter’s partnership with Spotify to help artists sell merchandise to their listeners. Curtains, is what it meant: Spotify and BandPage’s deal will come to an end on 20 July, with new merchandise partner Merchbar taking up the reins.
D2C firm BandPage has announced its latest milestone: it says it is sending more than 1m fans a month to musicians’ own stores via its partnerships with Spotify, Rhapsody, Rdio, […]
Earlier this year, BandPage and Rhapsody deepened their partnership to include push notifications to fans about their favourite artists’ latest special offers, based on their streaming habits. Now BandPage has […]
