A couple of weeks ago, The Charlatans' frontman Tim Burgess announced a new event in Manchester called Merch Market, where bands can sell their merchandise for free and keep 100% of the income.
To most people that would seem pretty logical. Why wouldn’t a band keep the full 100%? It’s their merch after all. But often, venues or festivals charge bands to sell their merch, sometimes even up to 20% of the revenue.
We don’t. All artists can sell their merch for free at the Left of the Dial Merch Store. We even provide a special print-to-order service for artists who can’t bring their own merch for whatever reason, or don’t have the money to invest in T-shirts and sweaters. All they have to do is send us their design, and we’ll take care of the rest.
This is quite an investment. A hundred plus bands bring their merch to the festival, so we need a lot of staff members to take in all those items. We have to rent a suitable space and we have to stock T-shirts in every size and colour for our print-to-order service. Over 4,000 purchases are made during the festival, which not only require even more staff, but it also means a lot of banking costs. And last but not least, we have to make sure the bands get paid for every sold item which is an administrative hassle.
But we don’t care.
It’s been pretty clear for ages that selling merchandise is crucial for touring bands to make ends meet. So, we decided never to take a percentage of their sales, but to come up with another – rather simple - way to cover our expenses: we also sell our own merch. Luckily, some of you seem to like the Left of the Dial stuff, and we usually sell just enough to more ore less break even!
We never want to compete with the bands, so if you can only buy one item, you should always pick something of theirs. But, if you have a little more to spend, please know that buying Left of the Dial merch is also a way of supporting artists.
And in the unlikely event of us making a massive profit on our own merch, we promise we’ll invest it in something cool. Like an animal shelter, or a fancy motion picture featuring every band that ever played Left of the Dial… or something else, we’ll cross that bridge if the money starts pouring in…
Big love,
The 0% takers of Left of the Dial
