When Wednesday stepped onstage earlier than a sold-out present opening for Seashore Bunny final 12 months, they took a second to admire the romantic setting of the almost century-old Fox Theater. By the point they ventured to the merch desk, although, their dreamy temper was a dim reminiscence; employees on the Oakland live performance corridor refused to barter, holding agency about taking a proportion of the band’s merchandise earnings that night. “Their merch reduce was actually rigid,” says Wednesday singer Karly Hartzman. “Having somebody be so intense to take $300 from a gap band is fairly despicable. They had been getting loads of cash already from the primary act, simply to take extra from a band that was barely making again their cash.”
Should you observe your favourite indie artists on social media, then there’s a great probability you’ve seen the dialog about merch cuts unfold over the previous few years. When a handful of artists began overtly discussing their experiences with venues taxing their merch in 2022, most people received to peek behind closed doorways. This Labor Day, Jeff Rosenstock uploaded a venue-by-venue breakdown of merch cuts on his headlining tour with an in depth rationalization of what all of it meant, which set the positioning previously generally known as Twitter ablaze. Singer-songwriter Tomberlin adopted go well with with a constant string of posts railing towards merch cuts, and later, her detailed callout of the Virginia amphitheater Wolf Lure went viral. The combat to retain full merch earnings has been an extended one, with bands talking up for years now. Numerous artists have joined the latest public discourse—together with Japanese Breakfast, Jack Antonoff, Ratboys, Dry Cleansing, Illuminati Hotties, and L’Rain—to say sufficient is sufficient.
The origin story of merch cuts has two unofficial tellings. When straightedge scenes began reserving exhibits at bars within the Eighties, pub house owners struck a deal to take a portion of a band’s merch earnings to offset the dearth of drink gross sales. That logic ultimately coaxed its means into all-ages exhibits and, in flip, established music venues. Others have stated that merch cuts started within the Nineteen Seventies. With the rising reputation of tour shirts as souvenirs, promoters and venue house owners in Los Angeles and New York Metropolis demanded a share of the earnings for internet hosting concert events on their property, Dying Fetus’ Jason Netherton instructed Decibel.
The normal percentages of earnings that venues take from merch vary from 10 to as a lot as 40 p.c, with these numbers various between smooth merch (clothes, hats, tote baggage) and exhausting merch (vinyl, CDs, cassette tapes). That’s a large reduce when you think about how a lot artists pay to create their items within the first place. When a band spends $8 to print a T-shirt and sells it to followers for $20, they earn a revenue margin of $12 per shirt. If that very same band sells their album on vinyl for $20, however needed to pay $15 wholesale for every particular person copy, that ends in a $5 revenue margin. For CDs, cassette tapes, and books, the revenue margins get even smaller. That meager pile of cash shrinks extra as soon as venues carve out their take, which ends up in artists elevating the value of merch.
