Gustavo TurnerSo you've built your musical brand and you've got “a following.” Are you ready to monetize this motherfucka? Well, profitable indie goddess (and quirky personal brand mistress) Amanda Palmer–aka, the no-browed Dresden Doll–just posted an informative post on her blog entitled, natch, “How to sell your shit, by Amanda fucking Palmer.” The post is cool, but what's way cooler is a handy list of links by her assistant Kayla. It's all you need to run your own merch operation!:
Amanda Palmer's Merch Genius Kayla, posing in front of a shitload of Amanda Palmer merch
Kayla's handy list includes all the resources for running your band business circa 2010.
This is Kayla's advice:
• bandcamp (so awesome. one-stop shopping for physical product and digital music. all sorts of awesome bells and whistles, plus an amazing group of people working there. if you are a musician and you’re not on bandcamp, stop reading this and fix that now)
• tunecore (a simple and affordable way to get yourself on itunes, amazonmp3, and tons of other places)
• orchard (ditto)
• ioda (ditto)
• CDBaby (ditto)
• IRIS (one more, similar to the last few)
• big cartel (who we’re using to power postwartrade.com)
• threadless (the big daddy of amazing shirts…enter your designs, buy others, etc)
• shirt.woot! (those of you complementing @indeciSEAN on his clever t-shirts should pay closer attention to these dudes)
• smugmug (go to dpexperience.com to save 20% btw)
• ebay (sell your stuff and buy other people’s…you’d be surprised what you can find on there)
• paypal (accept/send money)
if paypal ain’t your bag, check out: google checkout, amazon payments, or alertpay
• square (take credit card payments right on your phone – great for merch booths/fleamarkets/cons)
• amazon (yup, you can sell things there as well as blow your whole paycheck)
• kickstarter (a great way to get your project going/fund your crazy idea)
• VGkids – stellar people. stellar products. most all of the shirts/posters we’ve done lately have come from VG.
• bellwether – the great folks responsible for some upcoming releases…we found them via murder by death who use them for almost all of their CDs/DVD needs.
• one inch round buttons, buttons, BUTTONS…[…]
• pirates press responsible for the gorgeous evelyn evelyn vinyl.
• furnace – UkuleleHead red & orange vinyl and the forthcoming release of the dresden dolls’ “a is for accident” on limited edition vinyl…REMASTERED!
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