I can’t really remember how I came across this as looking at the date of the article I seem a little bit behind on this. But that’s beside the point. It seems music artists or at least the marketing teams or record labels have found a new way of packaging and distributing new albums that may (just may) help the plummeting sales of ‘the album’.
Instead of putting up a fight against the dwindling sales of the physical album in recent years, some bands and artists has looked towards a ‘medium’ that record labels are pushing artists to sell more and more of as the actual music of most artists become merely a door which leads to sales of gig tickets and merchandising.
The Music Tee (www.themusictee.com) allows artists to sell their music along with full artwork that comes in the form of a ‘high-end’ fashion garment, which is accompanied by a code for a full digital download of the album and full tracklisting.
The Music Tee is a new product line that combines digital music and fashion in one eye-and-ear-catching package.Music Tees are high-end t-shirts that feature album art and a tracklist. Each shirt comes with a unique code that can be used to download a digital copy of the album associated with that Music Tee. This enables people to discover and purchase music in fashion retail environments, then hear and wear an album!
Taken from The Music Tee
The Music Tee as a business concept is the brain-child of Girlie Action, a media, marketing and management company based in New York and Invisible DJ, who have an ‘avant-garde approach to business’ and ‘effectively merge music with fashion’. For me, this idea seems a fairly good way of reviving the design of album artwork, where over the past few years, this once cultural icon for art and music has become washed away with the digitizing and ‘shrinking’ of the art that used to be a much bigger part in the experience of buying and loving an album.
There will still be arguments that say this will in no way fight piracy and illegal sharing of music but for me this isn’t the only point to providing music content in a new way. There are people out there that miss the experience of deciding on splitting with their hard-earned cash for something made by someone they truly respect. These people shouldn’t be seen as ‘Luddites’ but really as respectable supporters of artists who produce something that is still the most affective and accessible form of art there is. This minority of music supporters are not stuck in the dark ages and therefore want to embrace the digital platform that music has been put upon but at the same time feel the need to take something more from their consuming of music.