Merchandise in Music

I fuckin' love music! I love everything music and i love music related things like guitars and amps and drums and concerts and gigs and people who are involved with music and productions and working in the industry and of course i love listening to music! But if there's one thing that pisses me off about working in the music industry, its the fuckin' merch! Dont get me wrong, i love wearing all the shirts and seeing pins and hats and stickers and all that fun stuff, but putangina, i have never had a harder time dealing with merch than i am now!

For one thing, getting shit packaged is so much easier said than done! Sure, you could just use a plastic bag and its done, but if you want quality for the price people are willing to pay, then obviously you wanna produce something that at least looks good packaged, even if thats got nothing to do with the actual merch! Im fuckin' dealing with plastic bags of different sizes, impulse sealers and a blow drier to get it done and even with all that, i still gotta sort out cardboard paper cuz otherwise the package shrinks and crumples the magazine in the pack.

Surely i understand the need for all these things, but when your deadline was 2 weeks ago, you start thinking fuckin hell how hard is it to get a sample and check out the merchandise?!

Another thing, the fucking stickers that are gonna be put on the shrink wrapped merch. Man oh man oh man! Ridiculously expensive when you get quotations from suppliers, when in the end i learned that you can do it on your own with your own office printer and some sticker paper from national book store! So, from spending anywhere from 8k to 10k for 480 stickers, you can do it yourself for who knows how much, but definitely not in the thousands!

In the end, my problem with this isn't that i've had to figure out suppliers and who to call and what was needed (cuz this is my first time ever assigned to such a project), its that i had no one freaking guiding me and telling me what next step i needed to take in order to get this thing in the stores. Had someone in the office thought, "hey, he's new to this, he's never ever done anything like this, maybe i / we ought to help him?", this whole fucked up experience would have been completely different?! But no...im expected to know everything about everything when i've never even fucking heard the term shrink wrap!!!

And then man, there's the bar codes!!! This bit is one of the most irritating parts of this experience! Not only am i being harassed by my boss to produce them NOW, the only person that can guide me through what needs to be done is only guiding me on a step by step basis, like im some fucking idiot that cannot understand step 2 had she given it to me. Anyway, im just pissed off! This sucks!

And to think, i dont put it out of reality for my boss to fire me over this bullshit! Im on probation and if i dont deliver or impress him with what i am capable of, i just wont be surprised if he let me go. And that really sucks because i dont even have a job description! No one, including me (and of course my officemates) have a clue what im supposed to be doing in this office! So its not like i was hired to handle the merch, i was hired for this reason which quickly became that reason which quickly became another reason til finally i landed the production manager role, which pretty much has no role when there are no shows...so im really stuck in the middle and a hard place. Sucks man! And i love this job! I love the work and i love working with foreigners at their over the top professional ways!!! If i lose this job over merch, im gonna fuckin have a completely different and jaded view on the music scene and the people who run it...Fuck Me!