THE IMPORTANCE OF MERCH IN MIMZ THE MAGNIFICENT'S ARTISTIC PROCESS
What inspired the idea to sell your project as a physical cassette tape and not to just rely on streaming as a means to consume music?
What's the artistic process behind creating merch for your projects?
Having art that is tangible, accessible, and able to be physically acquired is an art that artists bypass a lot these days. Sure a lot of major artists have budgets for large vinyl sales, but cassette is more accessible both to artists and consumers. They also feel very personal, I don’t want my art to just exist as digitized code. Even if you don’t have a cassette player, you’re able to hold and consume a whole other side of the art visually and physically. It’s important that instead of just stamping the same cover art on a bunch of physicals, we take time to understand how to have another piece of art attached to the music that delivers physical solitude.
The process is just as significant as creating the music itself. I wanna first say, shout out PTP Visions, and more specifically Geng Grizzly. He’s really the curator within creating and distributing my cassettes along with a lot of other artists that I love.
We spend a lot of time workshopping design ideas, collaborating on visual aspects, while also going through a mastering process specifically for cassette. With "MITOSIS", we both collaborated on design. Geng did all the CS and penmanship, I did the illustration over the cell you see on the physical tape. We spend a lot of time on the phone and in person putting ideas to life, it’s a process that requires a lot of patienence and love.
What difference have you seen between works that you've released accompanied with merch vs. works that weren't? Was the audience more engaged and receptive? Did it help to translate the overall message of your project.
Well, I’ve only released physicals for two projects. They are technically also my first projects released under public eye. When the idea of creating cassettes came about it was a drive to instill in people’s mind that the music doesn’t just live within a release date or time. Music is abundantly infinite, and if the world came tumbling down it means something to me to have a physical footprint of that creation. I think regardless of my overall audience, it’s clear that in everyone’s audience or “fan base” that people want to support. And creating such a personal physical body for your work I think is the perfect mutually benefiting way to go about delivering back to those who want to support.
How importan are merch sales to you as an independent artist?
Let’s be real, we all know nobody is getting paid off streaming. But somehow, people are more focused on listens than the actual people who support us and care about the continuation of our craft. There’s people with 100k streams, 100k followers, and yet they nobody shows up to their shows, or shows love in their hood. Making money isn’t really my goal when it comes to merch, it’s a nice incentive though to the hard work. That being said, merch is the only sustainable way besides performing for artists to make a plate. We spend so much time consuming digitally we don’t even realize that artists we’re consuming have nothing of consumption based off streaming. To put it simple, it’s very important to me to be able to eat.
Written By: Yohance Barton
Published: Dec 9th, 2021
Mimz The Magnificent is a rapper/ producer from Uptown New York City. And like most New Yorkers, they know how to hustle. They've consistently had very unique merch rollouts for their projects "Infinite Lawn", and "Mitosis". We took notice and decided to pick their brain on how they approach creating merch, and what it means to them.
When trying to reach an audience it's important to think outside the box. There's millions of artists across the world that have direct access to listeners because of the internet. Going the extra miles to create something tangible and of value for your audience is great way to go about growing your fan base and sustain yourself financially as an artist, because like Mimz said "nobody is getting paid off streaming," and thats a fact.