How Amazon’s Artist Merch Operation Is Changing the Game for Fans
Amazon’s new venue initiatives, led by a team of primarily women executives, are disrupting the long lines at venues — and making music merch more accessible.
Black News 
Before Doja Cat headlined her first arena tour in late 2023, Amazon’s merch team approached her managers with a proposition. “What if fans could buy T-shirts and hoodies without waiting in line at merch counters?” they asked. “What if Amazon shipped those T-shirts and hoodies to their homes, so they wouldn’t have to carry them all night?”
“That was super attractive to us,” says Josh Kaplan, the singer’s co-manager. “Most of her fans at shows dance, and having to worry about where you put your merch is cumbersome. If there’s any way to make that easier, we’re interested.”
Related
Six years ago, Amazon execs had the revelation that music stars made much of their revenue on merchandise sales and formed a U.S.-based team to work with them. By 2023, when the team began working with Doja Cat, Amazon’s technology involved QR codes at venues that allowed fans to instantly buy artist gear and have it shipped to their homes. In the years since, that initiative has morphed into Just Walk Out, a technology that uses cameras, sensors, AI and radio-frequency identification (RFID) so fans can grab a merch item and automatically pay for it simply by walking out.
Over the last year, Just Walk Out has evolved into the centerpiece of the retail giant’s music-merch empire. So far, Amazon has deployed it at Mariah Carey‘s Las Vegas residency and LE SSERAFIM‘s tour-stop pop-ups in Seattle and Los Angeles. “It became apparent quickly that queue-busting technology would benefit fans and help artists sell more merch at the venue,” says Kelsey Tubbs, Amazon Music’s artist merch and physical music head. “We’re looking at how we evolve this even further.”
Just Walk Out is “a game-changer,” says Jules Ferree, brands and ventures president for HYBE America, whose Source Music is the label home of LE SSERAFIM. “The frictionless transaction for the attendees was so powerful to witness. Our typical long lines could move at a different pace, which allowed us to pace it differently within the space.”
In addition to disrupting long concert lines, Amazon’s artist-merch program includes online Amazon-branded stores for Doja Cat, LE SSERAFIM and Peso Pluma; a Carey holiday store including a $160 Mariah Claus-with-sleigh-and-reindeer lawn inflatable; and a Drake “immersive virtual shopping experience” selling jigsaw puzzles, hair clips, birthday balloons and dice sets. In a statement, Carey calls her Amazon Music deal “one of the most forward-thinking partnerships I’ve experienced.”
Related
“We’re able to develop products that aren’t just wearables, [like] T-shirts and hats and typical things that artists release — we’re able to do a body pillow that has Drake’s face on it, and it sells out,” says Matte Babel, chief brand officer at DreamCrew, Drake’s creative studio, which produces films, TV shows and other projects. “Things like that take a little more development time and finessing. The Amazon team was willing to do new things. Sometimes [when] you deal with these big-box retailers or huge marketplaces, they’re not willing to bend.”
Amazon’s entry into the global music-merch market, which MIDiA Music estimates will hit $16.3 billion in 2030, up from $14 billion in 2024, is not hugely surprising. All three major labels have merch companies, and top brands are participating, too: American Express has partnered on merch with Billie Eilish, and American Apparel has a merch partnership with Live Nation.
Tubbs emphasizes that Amazon’s team, counter to the historically male-dominated music-merch business, in which top execs once employed motorcycle gangs to combat bootleg T-shirts at concerts, is primarily led by women. “From legal to finance and accounting to our head of production, brand management, tour operations — that is unlike what I’ve personally experienced,” says Julia Heiser, the team’s head of live music merch. “It’s been an added benefit on how we’ve talked about this to artists.”
Adds Tubbs: “We haven’t seen a lot of change in this space over several decades. You need diverse voices. We have wonderful, smart people who haven’t been in the room before who are now in the room. That brings something different to artist conversations.”
For decades, Amazon Music has combined its physical and digital resources to compete with rivals, from Apple to Spotify to physical music and retail stores. In the early days of MP3 downloading, when Apple’s iTunes dominated the market, Amazon secured market share by using physical CDs and T-shirts to draw consumers to its MP3 store. Since then, the company has famously beefed up its Prime service and home-delivery offering and is now using those assets in the music-merch space. Music fans can use Amazon, for example, to buy merch for an upcoming concert, receive it within a day or two, then wear it to the event.
After Amazon Music partnered with Beyoncé for the 2023 Renaissance tour, according to Heiser, the team discovered a key purchasing trend: Two days before the tour date in a given city, fans’ Beyoncé merch purchases began to slowly increase, peaking the day before the show. After the shows, “There was this halo of two days,” Heiser adds. “In some ways, looking back, it was, like, ‘Duh.’ But it was also this insightful piece of information. Artists are potentially missing out on that [demand] with tour merch when it’s exclusively available [at the venue].”
True to Amazon’s roots as an innovator, the company’s merch operation has, in six short years, moved beyond just selling merch to actually changing the way people buy it. “The first step was, ‘Merch is a big part of artist revenues and how artists are building their brands and careers, so let’s build a merch team,'” Tubbs says. “That’s where the seeds of it came from: We launched this business, then we realized, ‘If we don’t offer solutions around this tour-merch space, we’re leaving a big piece of the pie on the table.'”
