There’s a new study on music merchanise

[A report by Elisa F.G. – AC]

Pop quiz: There’s a bomb deal at a concerts band merch table, 50 bucks a t-shirt ($55 for long sleeve tee) if prices drop under $50 the merch table will blow up concert goers paycheques. What do you do? What do you do?

“I’d want to know what band it was” Might be Keanu Reeves’ answer, still not as intense as Dennis Hoppers monologue in Speed, but it can be if you collect band tee’s!

Seriously, let’s pretend concert merchandise dropped under $50, nay $25, leaving plenty of wiggle room for fans to blow money on more than one piece of concert memorabilia, what product would sell the most? What bands would sell the most product? What genre would sell out of merch first? What colours would make the most dough?

And to all the movie buffs reading, “Shoot the hostage” is not an acceptable answer.

A recent study by atVenue took a deep dive into researching music merch sales trends. Using the company’s point-of-sale technology, they were able to narrow down some interesting statistics one being…black T’s are the biggest sellers at 2X, over any other merch item available at venues. Hoodies are the third most popular sale across all genres.

Festival merch sales jumped to $66 per head in 2023 up from $58 in 2022, one would think sales would decrease post pandemic but they have in fact jumped, fans missed their bands…we get it.

When it comes to live shows (not festivals) per fan spending fell from $8.49 in 2023 to $8.16, in 2019 the average fan spent $5.54 per head at shows, $8.16 isn’t too much of a drop when you look at it that way.

The genre that sells the most per head overall? K-Pop for the win! An average of $27.25 is spent per fan. Metal fans and Alternative shows seem to make similar sales, metal fans spending about $9.76 and alternative fans spending a little less at $9.74 but out of all genres, they buy the most vinyls. Understandable. Who spends the least money at shows? EDM fans, and what genre sells the most hats? Country music merch tables! Country music was our first guess…so do we win a hat or something?

For the full study check it out here.