Platform Lets Artists Sell Branded Merch Direct From Videos, In Real Time

By Joseph Myers

With live music effectively canceled for the foreseeable future, pop mega-stars and local artists alike need all the help they can get selling branded merch. Come April 26, DroppTV plans to offer a solution through its “see it, want it, get it” AI smart video technology that lets consumers purchase items in real time while viewing performers’ videos.

For as long as musicians ply their trade, they will seek to marry their record sales with merch offers. We have covered plenty of artists, contemporary and long gone, who have benefited from either their own marketing skills or assistance from companies that know fans want more than their just their favorite singers’ tunes to show their admiration.

Enter DroppTV. Noting on its Twitter page that it empowers creators and brands by helping them instantly monetize content through its shoppable platform, the entity recognizes goods via its e-commerce platform and tags artists’ videos in real time. According to WWD, DroppTV will present branded merch such as hats, sunglasses and T-shirts to the masses, making each video a “virtual pop-up shop” that does not interrupt the experience of watching the artists’ visual complement to their songs.

https://twitter.com/Droppeverything/status/1244727568999342081?s=20

Relying on Gen Z as its target audience, DroppTV will debut with six artists, five of whom, to most ears, will likely be offering mostly unheard catalogs. Grammy Award winner Ashanti will be the most familiar name to many music lovers, but regardless of one’s reputation, the platform figures to create supplemental revenue streams for whichever musicians receive support from DroppTV.

Along with the aforementioned trio of products, DroppTV CEO Gurps Rai mentioned a sweater as a product that might entice fans of a given artist, but it seems that any item will work. And, crucially, it provides another potential revenue stream for branded merchandise businesses that work with these artists.

That makes us wonder how much a service like DroppTV could have helped music superstars of the past. For example, could you imagine what sort of attention the red jacket in Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” video might have fetched or the revenue that MC Hammer’s pants could have generated in the “U Can’t Touch This” video?