Slapping skins
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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.
