A Tangent On Merchandising

Posted on February 24th, 2012

Filed under: General — Karl Olson @ 4:40 pm

As many people are aware, no one makes money on selling music any more. Well, it’s not exactly like that, but it’s clear the money is more in ticket sales and merchandising. Even when you’re only a local Nerdcore rapper like me, the $5 to $10 per person made at the door is usually more money than the CDs sold that night. Besides ticket sales, the real money in t-shirts, posters and any other merch you can move. People like to show that they like your work, and will pay to advertise that fact and consider it a fashion accessory. That side of music as a business is something I’ve never really been good at taking on, but I think I only recently recognized why.

You see, even relative to Nerdcore, I think I don’t sell an image. Regardless of whether you’re talking about constantly touring rappers like MC Frontalot and Megaran, or people who currently focus more on local performances like Beefy and Death*Star, they put on a performance and have, to some extent, a stage persona. There is a show, a separation, a fourth wall. After my recent show in Seattle, a guy came up to me and told me my performance was Kaufmann-esque. Now, he meant that as a compliment and I take it as one – Andy Kaufmann was a genius. However, it means that I’m not holding any of the tricks back from the audience, or rather, there is a lack of separation between myself and them. The audience is part of the act to the extent any act exists in all. This was specifically evident in my last performance, where I went on stage after having fallen down half a flight of stairs. I plainly led the set off by saying I was in severe pain, I was likely going to screw up a song or two as such, and so told the audience to strap in and deal with it. There was not slightest element of a show or maintaining the fourth wall. Any persona I had that night boiled down to putting a sarcastic face around being racked with pain. Even the few staged bits, such as putting on blinking shutters shades, were in that context obviously a self-and-audience aware gimmick. Yet, people came up to me and said I put on a great show and that they liked my music.

I’m not sure if that presentation makes for a particularly good t-shirt.

Truthfully, the most congruent merchandise would probably be a shirt that said “Ultraklystron: I’m Selling You This Shirt Cause You Torrented My Discography,” or “Ultraklystron: A Rapper Maybe?.” There is no cool flipping of classic HipHop logos like MC Lars, nor a cool/cute comic book image of myself like MC Frontalot or Beefy, nor a witty tie into existing nerd properties like Death*Star, Klopfenpop and Megaran. Well, maybe I could do those things, but I’m fully self-aware of the act at hand – the commodification of myself – and I don’t like ignoring that. I don’t object to it either, but if I sold a shirt with me in anime style surrounded by anime girls, it’d probably say “Ultraklystron Doesn’t Live Anything Like This.” Maybe I could split the difference and just go with this.

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