Selling merch takes upfront cost and inventory most electronic music producers do not have. Merch in Town, launching June 17 in Montréal, removes both.
The electronic music industry is worth $15.1 billion and growing 7% a year. Most of the people who make the music cannot live on it. 76% of new artists call their careers financially unsustainable, and 82% hold a job outside music. The industry growth is real but it does not reach them.
Merch in Town, a Montreal company launching June 17, argues that merch is the missing piece, and it has staked the argument on a single number. The model assumes that roughly 2% of an artist’s audience will buy. Convert that 2% and the artist gains both a new revenue line and the data behind every sale. The whole case rests there, which makes the first question a plain one. Will the 2% hold?
To answer that, you have to look past the company to see why the gap exists at all. The shortfall is not the artist’s fault, and it is not the algorithm’s. It is structural, and the structure has a history. That history is the history of the technology that makes music.
Whoever paid owned it
Every major shift in how music makes money has followed a shift in the tools that make and record music. The format created the industry, and the cost of the format set the rules.
Recording used to be expensive. A studio was a physical place full of equipment and people, and a record cost tens of thousands of dollars to produce. The record label had to front that money and consequently own the recording. So the label held the master, and the master was the asset the whole business turned on. The model followed from the cost. The label funded the recording, the release earned the money back, the tour promoted the release, and merch let fans keep a piece of the night while the label recouped. Roles and splits were written into contracts. It was a stable machine, and it rested on one fact. Making a record was costly.
The cost moved to the producer, the revenue did not
Then the cost collapsed. The digital audio workstation replaced the studio, and a laptop with a producer’s skill now does what a room of engineers once did. Producing a track went from a five-figure investment to the price of a computer. That moved the economics. When the label no longer pays to make the record, the producer does, and by the logic that has always governed the business, whoever pays should own the master. In practice the producer rarely does, because the contracts were written for the old model and never updated, and most producers want the release more than a fight over rights. The ground under the old contracts had shifted, even if the paperwork had not.
It shifted under merch most of all. In the old machine, merch was the label’s instrument, written into the record deal as part of the recoup. In electronic music the label rarely pays an advance or signs an exclusive deal, so it has no stake in merch and no reason to run it. The job was never reassigned. It went undone. The format of the work changed too. The touring DJ travels carry-on and plays six to ten shows a month across as many cities, with no truck, no merch table, and no box of shirts. The one place the old model reliably sold merch, the tour, is physically gone.
So a scene built entirely on new technology inherited a revenue structure built for an older one, and the part that used to pay artists fell through the gap. This is why a billion-dollar boom and a broken artist sit side by side. The problem is structural, and the structure was never rebuilt.
A direct-to-consumer model the artist owns
Merch in Town, launching June 17 at Vino Disco in Montréal, is a bet that the missing structure can be supplied as a service. The founders, Fiona Ham and Édouard Bourgault Parisé, built it to fit the new format rather than the old one. No upfront cost, no inventory, worldwide fulfillment. The DJ carries nothing. The store ships itself.
It comes in two forms. The lighter one is a marketplace, a shared shop where underground DJs, labels, clubs and festivals sell under a non-exclusive license of their brand and logo. The heavier one is a full Boutique, a dedicated e-commerce store the act runs under its own name. The first lowers the barrier to almost nothing. The second gives the act a storefront of its own.
The 2% is a working assumption drawn from what operators report, not a measured constant, and the model needs it to hold for acts at the 5,000 level. For an audience of 5,000, that is 100 buyers. At $50 a piece, after production and an even split, the artist keeps about $1,200. Merch in Town treats that as a floor, the minimum it expects to add to an artist’s year, whether through the marketplace license or a full Boutique. How the split moves as volume grows is the other variable. These are the numbers to watch, and they answer the question the piece opened with.
The more interesting claim is about data. A sale is a chance to learn who the fan is and how to reach them, and where the buyer gives explicit consent, that record funnels to the artist’s CRM. “By converting their engagement into a transaction, the artist captures and owns that first-party data,” Édouard says. The consent step is both a constraint and the point. It is the same shift the DAW set off. The laptop put production in the producer’s hands. First-party data puts the audience there too.
Why now
The timing is not arbitrary. The same IMS report that sized the industry named merch a top-performing segment, with spending on physical products up 12% in a year while live revenue softened. Fiona Ham, who chairs the Underground Dance Single of the Year category at the JUNO Awards and runs HAUSOFHAM, reads the same moment from the inside: an aging core audience, a move toward festivals, a post-pandemic reset. “Even the best-structured institutions need to rethink how they build lasting relationships with their audience,” she says.
The diagnosis is hard to argue with. Technology made electronic music, and the same technology dissolved the structure that used to pay the people who make it. Any fix has to be built for the format that exists now, not the one it replaced. Whether Merch in Town is that fix is the open question, and it is the right one.
What an artist can do now
The leverage does not wait on any company. It sits in the artist’s own contract. A merchandise clause that asks the venue to provide selling space and to waive its cut turns the room into a point of sale the artist controls, and the buyer data that follows, with consent, is the artist’s to keep. That holds whether or not Merch in Town is the vehicle. The company is taking on artists from its June 17 launch in Montréal. The structural problem is large. The first move against it is small, one clause and the standing to ask for it.
Merch in Town launches June 17 at Vino Disco in Montréal (RSVP, limited capacity), with sets from Nathan Burns, Bolarinho, Guillaume Michaud, and TEETO.
Credit Text: Fiona Ham