Music Merchandise Quotes

In the Seventies, album artwork became really beautiful items. The whole process of doing an album sleeve, it became a very artistic thing.

Every time we give a musician the advice to give away the music and sell the T-shirt, we're saying, 'Don't make your living in this more elevated way. Instead, reverse this social progress, and choose a more physical way to make a living.' We're sending them to peasanthood, very much like the Maoists have.

Who were the biggest acts in the world in 1987? Guns N' Roses and Metallica. I shamelessly pandered to surfers and skateboarders, and in pictures from then, you'll see Slash and those guys wearing N.W.A stuff. If they thought it was cool, people in Kansas and Wyoming would buy it. That's how we broached the subject.

When I first started, you could go to a college campus and it was not cool to wear a country artist's shirt on campus. It was taboo, and there was a stigma involved. In the time from then till now, I'm amazed at how much things have changed. It's young now, it's cool, it's hip

I enjoy being involved in making the artwork for albums and stupid stuff like that.

We didn't like the idea of Dixie Chick action figures. I mean that's just the kiss of death for a group. How could a hip teenager enjoy the Dixie Chicks while their little sister is playing with a Martie doll in the other room?

I have been doing merch' since I was 15 and in bands when I was a teenager - silk-screening shirts, making the emulsion in my mom's closet I converted into a dark room, through college. That's essentially how us bands survived was selling homemade t-shirts.

I used to go and cop stacks of blanks CDs and sit there and burn copies of my mixtapes and print up my own mixtape covers and post up in downtown Oakland and Telegraph in Berkeley and literally was selling my mixtapes for five bucks, hand-to-hand.

Queen were the first western band I got hooked on. I got a bootleg - there was hardly any legal buying of CDs in Georgia.

I had 45 Avril Lavigne posters. Those were my first posters.

Whether it be tour posters, album packaging, videos, stage design, etc., the visual aspect of music is very important to us.

When I was growing up, I saw the Aaliyah shirts, the DMX shirts, or the collab shirts with DMX and Aaliyah when they had a single together. Those were the dope collage shirts with their faces all over it. They were doing cool things like that.

Don't change a thing. That's one of the best gimmicks a band could ever come up with.

My fans kept asking where they could get clothes like 'Destiny's Child's', so it was only natural for us to do a clothing line. I was adamant about not putting my name on something that I didn't love.

Back in the day people made music to go on tour. They didn't make music to make a video.

I didn't really buy LPs or go to concerts.

People love music, but they also love the lifestyle and glam that comes along with it.

I remember this vividly: It was 1977, and I was in Sears with my mom. And I saw this display, and it was for 'Love Gun.' I bought the record just because of the look of that display. Because I really loved monsters.

Back in the '90s, if you did mail order in music, you could make a good living doing it if you could hustle.

It was always a plan that we were going to have a retail side with what were doing musically, like an Apple store or Nike Town. I wanted something where you can come get everything - 'Marathon' or 'All Money' or 'Crenshaw' - and make it like an experience. Especially with what Crenshaw and Slauson meant to my story.

Everybody had posters in their room; everybody had the four symbols of Zeppelin on the wall and all that.

Nowadays, with the state of the music business, for any artist, whether you're up-and-coming or you've been in it for awhile, you have to explore different revenues and different ways of expressing yourself.

Around Christmas time, I passed by a Hot Topic at the mall. They had the Christmas decorations up in the front of the store with AC/DC and Metallica, Harry Potter, Star Wars and Bullet Club. So, we are certainly a part of pop culture.

I have been a fan of the Beastie Boys ever since I can remember. I have a ton of their music on my iPod and even still have a t-shirt from a show I saw when I was a kid.

By packaging a full album into a bundle of music with ringtones, videos and other combinations and variations, we found products that consumers demonstrably valued and were willing to purchase at premium prices. And guess what? We've sold tons of them.