How to make money from your concert posters

Concert posters are a REAL source of revenue for every band with even the smallest of followings.

Once you have a fanbase that turns out to shows, you can use posters to both promote those shows and as a source of revenue. Fans love a quality poster as a memento of the event.

Phish are the masters of this with each new set of dates accompanied by the pre-sale of an individual poster for each show. Before they even start prmoting the gig (let alone playing it) they have earned several thousand dollars.

You might well not be at that scale, but selling posters from your site and from the merch table is something you should be looking at - high quality art and a distincive approach to branding is obviously a key ingredient (see Phish for ideas!)

But, there are issues with ownership and rights that you need to sort out.

Concert posters have long been the standard when promoting gigs. It’s simple, efficient, and people generally love seeing these unique pieces of art. In today’s DIY market coupled with fading music sales, artists are beginning to rely heavily upon poster design as an additional merchandise revenue stream but few realize concert posters/design pack a hefty legal punch. In short: Who owns the concert poster? The band that’s performing? The designers who designed the poster? Perhaps the venue that booked the artist? If you don’t think these issues are important, think again.

Check out this article for more.

DJ Shadow on Merchandising on the road

Last part (4 of 4) on Hypebot that we've followed, as a member of Shadow's team, Michael Fiebach, gives a master class on music marketing and  promotion. See the first part on the MiiM Dailies here.

This last part looks at the merchandising that they've made for this tour and gives a best practice guide. It's gold!

I love the fact that he points out that merch is pointless if you're band is whack - no-one will buy it! - and that a genius yet utterly obvious idea is to have bags! People will buy more and can check it to pick up after the show. So simple but almost never done.

This sums up the basics of the merchandising approach.  Care, attention, and quality are the most important things, and as with ALL of the topics I am discussing, if the music isn't good, and isn't commercially viable, then none of this matters.  So upcoming bands: perfect the music before you dive into this wonderful world of Direct To Fan mania. 

Read the piece here.