How a T-shirt Side Hustle Shaped my Album Release

Process of product elimination

I’ve been involved in a little fun experiment over the last year now. I’ve been wanting to begin making a little money from my music endeavors. The timing seemed to make sense; with years of performing under my belt, thousands of dollars invested into performance gear, a nice list of originals that help me perform a full show and a strong brand and web presence for my solo project. So, I began the journey of recording my live music towards publishing a live album.

All the pieces of the puzzle seemed be in place for a vision of releasing a profitable music project. On top of all of that I’m also very lucky to be a skilled marketer. A lot of people think that successfully marketing is achieving mass awareness earning huge amounts of followers and streams of the music. I can agree that is a great outcome but it is not necessarily what I wanted to achieve with my project. I just wanted to start making some money doing what I loved.

I’ve learned over my years of marketing products - ranging from software to television programing to tourism - that the biggest obstacle of successful marketing is the love of your own products and ideas and stubbornness to not accepting that some products or ideas, though good - may not be viable to present to the masses. Sometimes you need to let the people tell you which product you should market.

Here is an example. A while back ago I decided to do a side-hustle by selling T-shirts. During my lunch times, when I was working as a telecom company marketing coordinator, I would come up with a t-shirt design. At the end of the hour I would publish it on Cafepress - a place where people could order a design printed on a shirt and the designer would get a royalty payment. Over time I had a nice little online t-shirt shop and began to have some designs that sold. The problem with Cafepress is both the t-shirt and ink were low quality. If anyone bought the tee it was most likely for a funny gift - which explained why the comical designs rose to the top.

I did my first daring entrepreneur move by taking my top-rated designs, scratching some money together and printing them up locally on high quality tees and ink. I took the shirts to high end jean shops and local bookstores. Three of the designs flopped, but the fourth one not only sold out - it started to get back ordered at my consignment shops. I found a winner and made 4x my money back from the printings. Not bad! It was such a good selling design that copy cat designs started showing up. Instead of getting into legal copyright battles I decided to glean from the process and take the distilled marketing strategy on with me for other endeavors.

I’ve taken this same strategy with my live album “Always Say Goodbye,” which was recorded from my live shows in 2022/2023 in Oregon. I recorded the entire length of almost all of my shows, mastered the tracks that were good one-takes and them published them. After 50 track releases - totaling 3 hours and 54 minutes of live music recordings I pulled the brakes on the project. Just like the t-shirts some songs really started to rise on my personal Billboard charts. I then decided to publish an album with the top live tracks and put the 42 other songs into the archives.

Now - that the 8-songs are out I’m seeing good traction with streams and downloads and most importantly I’m discovering which song or two I’m going to put some money into for studio time and producing a video - applying real quality to winning music products.

Seems like a lot of work doesn’t it? Well it is, but in the end - I might have a few songs out there in the universe that people are wanting to buy and add to their music collection and I might win some money back. So, it’s worth the effort.