Go to the Justin Bieber site and try and buy some merch and instead you have to sign up for a newsletter. “Tour merch available everywhere now” except nowhere you would expect. It is a whole new  world out there of high fashion and $1,675 tour jackets. One printed word and a skimpy scrap of cloth goes for big bucks (but that has to be the right word in the right place, and that skimpy scrap has to be just the right cut.)

There is a very good New York Times article on this phenomenon that came out this week.

Alchemist, Vestments, Bravado, Barney’s, Dior and more are not what used to be in articles about music merch but it is a brave new world,of clothes and tunes and a whole lot of image. Music and fashion are merging in ways that nobody could have really expected. I guess musician’s and their big business cohorts had to think of some way to make the large bucks when you can’t sell CD’s any more and people only want to download for free and Spotify wants to pay you chump change. Hey, maybe high fashion means we’ll get paid $1 to print a $150 shirt instead of the $.35 we get on the $35 shirt…