Omg Their Logo is my favorite band.
Also local bands.
The shirt material will grate your nipples off.
To be fair as a local band it is really hard to make money on printing merch these days. I always try to spring for the Bella when I’m ordering but it’s like 11 dollars a shirt for one color printing and people are cheap buying it
Just gotta go the “silk screened in mom’s garage” route to pump them babies out on demand. Once you’ve made the screen, you’re golden. Pretty easy if you’re just printing out transparencies, $3 or $4 per Gildan, $8 per Bella at a craft store[1] and paint costs are negligible after initial purchase. Frankly I wouldn’t spring for anything fancy since when it comes to “how much will I pay for band merch” the quality of said article is likely irrelevant.
though you can get em half that if you shop around online, getting stuck with shirts you’ll never sell would suck ↩︎
I’ve found that streamers tend to have pretty nice merch. Unfortunately it tends to be pretty expensive because of special requirements and fairly small production runs. They also interact with the viewers directly, so complaints likely come up on stream.
It seems like Youtubers on the other hand just send a picture to a merch producer and let them deal with it.
Custom T-shirts with extremely limited runs (hundreds) cost $10. Creators are selling them for $20+. Creator merch is a scam or if you want to look at it more positively, a donation with an item in return but no items sold by a creator is even close to a reasonable profit margin.
Some people here are saying they won’t be an ad. I get that, but I proudly wear my Darknet Diaries t shirt. I’m sure there’s a large margin that goes to Jack. But it’s worth it to me. I might get another shirt now that I’m thinking about it.
I feel differently about clothing that has the name of the clothing company on it than I do clothing that has the name of a podcast or something like that.
There’s people out there I’d gladly be ad for, Drachinifels comes to mind.
The comfy in-between is references that seem broadly appropriate, and blatant in-jokes that just sound interesting. Respectively: the “you go girl” shirts with Jax on them, and bumper stickers reading “stay sexy and don’t get murdered.” You don’t have to know the thing they’re from. You don’t have to know they’re from a thing.
My opinion on this is that they’re already getting money from ads, I have no desire to wilfully turn myself into an ad for 99.9% of YouTube channels. I felt the need to clarify because, truth be told, I along with many others are already walking advertisements sometimes.
I wear band shirts, and I love advertising the shit out of them. But it feels different to advertise bands and musicians on clothing than it does most YouTube channels. The impact is something I think about: maybe I don’t feel as strongly about them because they have not been impactful in the same ways, in the sense that I still listen to music from when I was a kid occasionally (and I can’t imagine saying this about YouTubers in general).
I’d probably rock classic British comedy stuff too. Anything timeless I suppose.
My opinion on this is that they’re already getting money from ads
Are they? With so many people, especially here on Lemmy, willing to go hard to adblock plus a steadfast refusal to pay for YT Premium I’d guess that most smaller YT Content Creators are getting very little ad revenue. Without Merch sales and Patreon how are they supposed to get any money to support themselves?
I understand your point about being a walking billboard and I feel the same way but these days it just feels like no one wants to contribute in any way to help support small time creators.
That’s why I go out of my way to support the Lil guys when possible. Wish more had better merch vs logo on generic t.
