The short version
Everyone who walks up to your table has already self-selected. Most bands use that moment to complete a twenty dollar transaction and nothing else. It should be doing two jobs.
A person who crosses a room to look at your shirts is the warmest a stranger will ever be about your band. That is a fact about human behaviour, not a marketing claim, and it is worth building around.
The money is genuinely there right now
MusicWatch reported that spending on music merchandise rose 45 percent in 2024, with per-capita live music spending at $281.08, up 17 percent year on year. The share of the population buying concert tickets went from 51 to 56 percent.
growth in music merchandise spending in 2024
MusicWatch, reported by Billboard
People are spending more on merch than they were, and more of them are going to shows. The constraint on most local bands is not demand at the table. It is that the table can only do one thing at a time.
Setting it up so it earns twice
- 01A dynamic QR code, printed big, at eye height. On the banner, on the wall, on the venue screen if they will let you. Not flat on the table where it is hidden behind a pile of mediums.
- 02Something worth scanning for. Nobody gives up a phone number for a newsletter. An unreleased demo, the photos from tonight, five dollars off right now.
- 03A text that fires immediately, while they are standing there. If it arrives Tuesday they will not remember who you are.
- 04Automatic tagging by venue and town, so the list knows where every name came from.
- 05One person who owns the table for the night. Usually whoever is not loading out.
The sold-out-of-mediums problem
You will run out of the size everyone wants halfway through the set. That is a physics problem, not a stocking failure. You can only carry so much in a van.
The fix is a scan-and-ship path: they scan, pay on their phone, print-on-demand sends it to their door. You take money for a shirt you do not have, in a size you did not bring, at eleven at night. Lower margin than a shirt from the box, infinitely better than a shrug.
Where the money goes
Straight into your bank. You connect your own payment account and it never passes through us. We do not take a percentage of your merch, your music, or your door.
If anyone offering you a merch setup will not put that in writing, ask why not. A percentage of every shirt you printed, carried and sold out of a van at midnight is an expensive way to buy a storefront.
Sources
Want this running for your band?
We build the site, wire the fan capture, and keep it running. And we come to the shows, which is the part a platform cannot do.
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