Will “The Music Tee” Take-Off and What Is Its Potential?
The Music Tee is a pretty cool concept developed by LNAclothing and Invisible DJ. Invisible DJ works with artists and record labels regularly to develop unique programs and platforms to promote music for up and coming artists. LNA sells plain-ish-American-Apparel-ish style clothes primarily to the funky, hipster crowd. Naturally, these two companies would come together at some point, and hence, The Music Tee is born.
The Music Tee prints the album cover art on the front of the tee, and the song list on the back. The hangtag that comes with shirt purchase contains a URL that allows you to download the entire album. Sounds awesome you say? I think so too. What I see are a few ways the Music Tee may inspire within the music world…somewhere most of us think of as a slowly dying place where artists don’t get enough credit (or money) for their work, and labels are doing everything in their power to stay afloat. Here are a few of my thoughts on how Music Tees can boost the industry:
- Easy, grassroots style promoting (who doesn’t like to wear t-shirts of their favorite bands?)
- Bringing back the enthusiasm for awesome cover art
- Generate revenues for the digital music that would replenish sales that are lost and diminishing from cds
- An easy ice-breaker for meeting people who share the same music tastes
The first music tee I saw is the one for “The Asteroids Galaxy Tour” that is being promoted on the site. This makes sense because Invisible DJ contacts and clients tend to be up and coming artists. However, Mos Def just started selling Music Tees for his latest album, which gives a little more credit to the product and increases the chances that this concept will take off. A blurb was written about music tee in YPulse, a Gen Y online publication, and feedback/comments tend to be very positive for everything I’ve seen about the subject. I’ll be watching how Gen Y responds to this once it really goes mainstream. From an interactive perspective, there are many ways we can build off this concept to create cool campaigns for music tees. This could be something like developing an application to allow fans to “Design-Your-Own Music Tee”, to contests that leverage multiple social networks. The Music Tee already utilizes a concept of social advertising by having people wear their own advertising and talk about the album on their backs, and therefore lends itself quite easily to the social world on the web. Or, this could be a combination of both – something similar to what Twitter and Threadless Tees in a collaboration called Twitter Threadless Tees (create your own t-shirts with your tweets!).
Kudos to LNA and Invisible DJ for thinking outside-the-box. I love the concept, and I think it will do a lot for music fans and artists alike.
The Mos Def Music Tee:
