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Skins used to be animal parts or touch football teams. Now all sorts of software and hardware sport skins. Trustkill Records is selling band-branded skins via MusicSkins, the tech toy equivalent of CafePress. Via 3M vinyl, it’ll slap your designs on iPhones, Sidekicks, Blackberries, and so on. Especially cool are the laptop skins. I have been to far too many techno nights where laptop musicians point Apple’s logo at me. Techno labels could make a killing here.
Terror – One with the Underdogs
This is a step towards what I proposed in this post about record label survival: shifting revenue streams to non-downloadable products. I’m conflicted about this. Do I want a world of Opeth bathmats and Judas Priest “Hot Crockin’” cookware? As I pointed out in this post about holiday gifts, metal already has loads of silly merchandise. Getting people to buy stuff they don’t need has helped cause today’s financial mess. But would it be OK to metal-brand necessaries? Support the band and stock up on paper towels? One’s environment need not be branded – see, e.g., No Logo or Muji stores. But if it must be branded, the next best thing would be to rebrand it as one chooses.
Your mention of Opeth bathmats and my recollection of a shower curtain that reprinted old CBGB flyers made me think. Wouldn’t it be cool to have metal album covers on shower curtains?
They’d be functional artwork hanging in your bathroom.
I would buy a Dark Tranquillity Skydancer cover (the Spinefarm one) in a heartbeat.
A Blackwater Park curtain would compliment your bathmats well.
That’s an interesting idea. I wonder if people would buy Cannibal Corpse shower curtains.
Also, No Rest for the Wicked bedsheets come to mind.
well it beats having a wal-mart shower curtain. anything to have something different. if you can get a dalek shower curtain, might as well get some sort of metal/album cover shower curtain. how about kiss me, kiss me, kiss me as a shower curtain. oh the hilarity
I only want the music, the album layout, and the t-shirts. Maybe the odd poster or two for the garage.
I want a Symphonies of Sickness skin for my Macbook, although that might not fly when I bring it to the office, so I might settle for either a Bolt Thrower: In Battle There Is No Law or Darkthrone: FOAD skin.
I wanna go…….HOT CROCKIN’! Nicely done IO.
Oooh, Bolt Thrower would make for some awesome skins.