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Archive: merchandise

Showing your support — F1 teams and merchandise

13 August 2008 01:29

Categories: History, Opinion

About a month ago Craig at Craigblog wrote a post about F1 merchandise. It was quite a coincidence because at the same time I was on the verge of buying the first piece of F1 merchandise I had bought for a very long time.

Since the turn of the decade I have watched Formula 1 pretty much as a neutral. Of course, I prefer some teams and drivers more than others. In case you’re wondering, my favoured teams are BMW, Red Bull, Renault and (at a stretch) McLaren. Out of the drivers, I like Räikkönen, Heidfeld, Kubica, Alonso, Coulthard, Webber, Barrichello and (at a stretch) Kovalainen.

When I was younger my attention was grabbed by Stewart Grand Prix. Jackie Stewart’s was a famous name that I could latch onto, and the Scottish iconography appealed to me as a young Scot. I also loved the fact that they were a new team, seemingly with the odds against them, but did a fairly solid job.

Rubens Barrichello’s drive to 2nd in Monaco in 1997 was exciting to watch, and for a second I thought they were going to win when Michael Schumacher briefly ran off the road at Ste Devote. Mostly though 1997 was a year fraught with reliability problems. 1998 brought a further dip in form.

But the 1999 season as a whole was brilliant for Stewart GP as Barrichello once again shone. Who could forget Barrichello leading at the Brazilian Grand Prix? And then Johnny Herbert took a fantastic win at the Nürburgring. This team was only three years old, yet was in a position to fight for good points hauls, finish 4th in the championship and even win a race. That’s more than the team’s subsequent owners, Ford (as Jaguar) and Red Bull can say for themselves.

Besides Stewart, I developed a soft spot for Jordan. I loved the way they came back from a disastrous start to 1998. Halfway through the season they hadn’t even scored a single point. Then things started to look up during the British Grand Prix. I can remember watching a fly-on-the-wall documentary about Jordan’s 1998 season. Eddie Jordan was nervously pacing around the Jordan pit area mumbling, “I need this feckin’ point… Come on, I need this feckin’ point so much.” He got that feckin’ point.

Just a few races later Jordan Grand Prix scored a magnificent 1–2 in Belgium, with Damon Hill heading Ralf Schumacher. It was the team’s first win and it ushered in a new, though fleeting, era of competitiveness for the team.

The 1999 season was a joy to watch, not only for Stewart but for Jordan and Heinz-Harald Frentzen in particular. The German driver took an amazing six podiums including two wins, particularly memorably in France. For a long while it looked as though Frentzen was a genuine championship contender, though in the end it was not to be.

In retrospect, the work the Jordan team put into the 1999 season diverted their attention away from the future. Ian Phillips said as much in the latest Inside Line podcast — the championship run burnt the team out, and they never recovered.

In subsequent years the Jordan team drifted ever further into mediocrity and it became more and more difficult for me to like the team. 2003 was particularly painful. Giancarlo Fisichella took a flukey win in Brazil, but that disguised a truly awful season in which the team otherwise scored the miserable total of three points. If the previous year’s scoring system would have been in use, the win would have been their one and only points score.

To compound matters, in 2003 Eddie Jordan got into a needless legal fight with Vodafone which he was seemingly never going to win. From then on Jordan struggled financially. That team is now known as Force India and has had four different owners in the past five years.

However, the late 1990s were great Jordan-supporting days. And along with supporting the team comes the merchandise. I had two Jordan caps (one generic Jordan and the other Damon Hill, mimicking the Hills’ famous helmet design). I also had a Damon Hill t-shirt that commemorated the “place in history” that Hill took by taking the first win for the Jordan Grand Prix team. I also have a 1:43 diecast model of Damon Hill’s Jordan 198, the car he drove in 1998 and helped secure Jordan’s famous 1–2 in Belgium.

That is not the only F1 merchandise I bought when I was younger. I also had an Orange Arrows cap. I think I got it because I liked the colours. I am sometimes surprised to see people still wearing Orange Arrows gear from time to time, around six years after the team folded. I also had a rather colourful Ferrari t-shirt commemorating their 1999 Constructors Championship victory. What can I say? The folly of youth.

In addition to the Damon Hill 1:43 diecast, for a period of five years I decided I was going to collect 1:43 scale models of every single Formula 1 world champion. So in 1998 and 1999 I bought two Mika Häkkinen McLarens and from 2000–2002 I bought three Michael Schumacher Ferraris.

To spice things up a bit I bought models of Alberto Ascari’s 1952 Ferrari 500 F2 and Nelson Piquet’s 1981 Brabham BT-49C. But I got bored after that.

Grand Prix Legends were looking for excuses as to why diecast models don’t sell so well nowadays. I think the reality is that 75 quid for a 1:18 model that will only gather dust on a shelf is a bloody rip-off. Back in the day I think I spent around £20 per 1:43 model. I don’t think that’s something I would do today.

Aside from the normal annual purchases of video games (when available) and the season review DVD, I have not bought any Formula 1 merchandise for a while.

Until now.

BMW Sauber t-shirt

I have bought this jazzy BMW Sauber t-shirt to express my support for the team. Like many, I have been wooed by the methodical, grounded approach of the team’s principal Mario Theissen and its drivers Nick Heidfeld and Robert Kubica.

The win was coming for a while, and the fact that it was a 1–2, just like Jordan’s maiden win, was the icing on the cake. The team’s recent dip in form won’t deter me. Now, for the first time for several years, I am not a neutral. I am supporting BMW Sauber.

It’s strange because I was never a supporter of the Sauber team at all. Nor was I keen on BMW when they were in partnership with Williams. But the magical combination of BMW and Sauber under the leadership of Mario Theissen has attracted me to them to the extent that I am a card-carrying, t-shirt wearing fan.

So which teams do you support, and do you buy merchandise to show that support?

3 comments

The future of music: gigs and t-shirts

13 January 2008 02:38

Categories: Current affairs, Economics, Entertainment, Internet, Music, Technology

Copyshite

A series of posts

  1. Copyshite
  2. The entertainment industry’s wrong turns
  3. The future of music: gigs and t-shirts
  4. The future of music: pretty boxes

Apologies for taking so long to get round to writing this post. That pesky life business getting in the way as usual.

In the previous posts in this series I have been waxing lyrical about copyright law and the mistakes the entertainment industry has made in adapting to a world with the internet. Over the past couple of years, people in the music industry have — belatedly — begun to tackle the issue properly.

Radiohead made big news last year with their latest album, In Rainbows. What hit the headlines was their novel pricing structure. You could choose the price you wanted to pay for it, between zero and £100.

This idea wasn’t all so novel though. Radiohead are by no means the first band to release their music for free, or to take the ‘honesty box’ approach to pricing. They certainly won’t be the last.

Prince did a similar thing this year as well when he gave away his latest album free with copies of the Mail on Sunday. This led to the odd sight of branches of HMV installing a dumpbin of the paper for one day only.

It’s worth thinking about exactly what Radiohead did by implementing a choose-your-own-price method. The record industry often likes to talk about how much it has “lost” as a result of piracy. But the numbers they use are misleading.

As Tim Worstall pointed out on his (now tabloid) blog many months ago, demand curves slope downwards. So the record industry don’t lose anything like as much as (number of illegal downloads) × (RRP of a CD) as a result of the download revolution.

The old model meant that people could basically either choose to buy a CD at its RRP or pass on it completely. So if you were only willing to pay £11.98 for a CD that was priced £11.99, you wouldn’t buy it. That is fine — that is how the market works.

But when filesharing became more common, people could choose to buy a CD at its RRP or download it for free. Those were the only options available. So if you were still willing to pay £11.98 for that CD, you would not pay £11.99 — you’d just download it for free. From £11.98 and lower, record companies were losing profits. They didn’t know how to deal with this, so used the ham-fisted techniques I described in the previous post instead of coming up with a new business model like they should have done.

The In Rainbows method tackled the problem head-on. Under Radiohead’s system, if you were willing to pay £11.98, you could choose to pay £11.98. What’s more, if people were willing to pay, say, £80 for the album, they could choose to pay that as well.

Chances are that most wouldn’t. You could legally download it for free, so lots of people will have done this without feeling any sense of guilt. Radiohead aren’t releasing any figures, so we can’t tell. But reading between the lines of the interviews Radiohead have given, they seem quite happy with how the experiment has worked out and most estimates suggest that Radiohead have made more money using the honesty box approach than they would have done with the old way — mostly because all of the middlemen have gone.

The middlemen are a big problem. They seem to be particularly so at EMI. Recently EMI was taken over by a private equity firm, Terra Firma. They appear to be particularly clueless. In the space of a few months they have managed to piss off three of the biggest acts on their roster — Radiohead, Paul McCartney and now Robbie Williams.

Here is some insight from Paul McCartney:

“I’d started saying to them: ‘Look, we could write a thing and have it released the next week.’ And they would say: ‘You can’t do that these days.’ So I would say: ‘Well, how much time do you need?’ And they’d say six months. I said: ‘Why do you need that long?’ And do you know what they said? ‘To figure out how to market it.’ I said: ‘Wait a minute, are you sure you need six months for that? Couldn’t some bright people do that in two days?’ Jesus Christ. I said: ‘Look boys, I’m sorry, I’m digging a new furrow.”

EMI seem to be making the mistake of treating artists like widgets. They have mistaken creativity for something that can be switched on and off like a tap.

And they seem to be amazingly inefficient. Fans know all-to-well about the six month gap between the announcement of a new album and its actual release date. It surely don’t have to be that way. Indeed, one of the most refreshing things about In Rainbows was that it was announced a mere ten days before its release.

So if the middlemen are no longer needed and are actively hurting the artists and the fans, does it mean labels are doomed?

Well, Radiohead took a risk, and it paid off. A lot of people say they were in a lucky position. And they were. Radiohead are the best band in the world and probably the most popular contemporary band. They were always going to do well regardless.

But what about the smaller bands? Surely the chances are that they won’t do as well as Radiohead by adopting such an honour system.

But honour systems work. Paul Feldman the bagel salesman knows that. LibraryThing has been using such a model for a while, and found that their takings increased once they adopted the system.

A lot of music fans are extremely loyal to their favourite bands. They are just the type of people who won’t take advantage of the fact that you can get music for free. They get such a warm glow from knowing that they are rewarding their idols.

Labels and bands may still be wary. If honour systems don’t convince, the common answer to the problem is to release music for free and use it as a way of generating publicity so that more money can be made from touring. Alan McGee, manager of The Charlatans, who are also now giving away their music for free, reckons that it could even triple the size of the crowds at gigs.

Merchandise is also becoming increasingly important. There is a theory that the reason concert promoters don’t charge the market value for gig tickets is because keeping the price low attracts a younger audience. These youngsters will go on to buy loads of t-shirts from the merchandise stall, so in the end everyone involved makes more money. Some bands are even stopping selling CDs at gigs for fear of cannibalising t-shirt sales.

So the future of music is gigs and t-shirts. This is great for my wallet. I rarely attend concerts, and I am more and more reluctant to buy t-shirts.

But I think the music industry could still potentially make lots of money from selling physical copies of the music. And my wallet won’t be so happy about that. That will be the subject of my next (and, at last, final) post in the series.

« Previous in series — Next in series »

3 comments

F1 merchandise: why?

7 June 2006 15:49

Categories: Formula 1, General

Bernie Ecclestone’s official Formula 1 store has opened for business. The consensus from the F1 websites seems to be something like, “At last! Finally F1 has realised what MotoGP / Nascar / ChampCar / Qatari Formula Bum have known for ages.”

Well I’m sorry, but I don’t see the point of it. I answered a survey on Formula1.com last year. One of the questions asked if I would buy Formula 1 branded merchandise (if not, why not?). I answered, “No, why would I?” I would look like one of those gormless people who wear shirts that say “No. 1 Footy Fan!!!!” For me, wearing a polo shirt with ‘Formula 1′ written on it is about as pointless as it gets.

I am a fairly neutral F1 fan (if I have a favourite team at the moment it’s McLaren, but I take the piss out of them all the time so I don’t think I actually like them that much). Yet I am not particularly loyal to Formula 1 itself. I am indeed a loyal fan of top-flight Grand Prix motor racing. But I wouldn’t be shedding any tears if Formula 1 were to disappear tomorrow to be replaced by another championship that showcased the world’s best drivers in the world’s best racing cars at the world’s best circuits (as could have happened if the GPMA threat was real).

I sometimes buy the annual season review DVD, which is of course official F1 merchandise. But apart from that, if I ever buy any Formula 1 merchandise — which isn’t often — it is for a particular team or driver. In the past I have bought Jordan and Stewart badges, a Jordan baseball cap and a Ferrari t-shirt. But it would have to be a really good deal to persuade me to buy anything with Bernie’s logo on it.

F1 baseball cap Which brings us neatly on to the prices. GrandPrix.com said, “The items on offer are aimed at the high-end of the market,” which I think is the polite way of putting it. The F1 store is selling baseball caps priced at £125. Apparently the F1 logo on these caps is made up of over 300 “Swarovski® Crystals”, which I assume is meant to be a good thing. But it looks really ugly.

Carbon fibre mousemats (£250 a pop) and watches (£390) are all very nice. But for a sport that’s often criticised by some as being too much of a rich playboy’s sport, shouldn’t they be trying to sell merchandise that will appeal more to the man on the street? As F1 Fantatic points out, this is a difficult balance to strike. It could lead into the territory of Nascar Meats.

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