For decades, fans of all types have enjoyed buying merchandise to show off their passion for their favourite interests. While music artists most commonly have merchandise, you can find it for just about any interest, including TV and film, video games, and even your favourite YouTubers.
This merchandise can range from clothing items like T-shirts, beanie hats, and hoodies to miscellaneous items like mugs, badges, bags, and posters. Eco-friendly merchandise options are also available for artists and fans who want to limit their environmental impact, with many items made from sustainable and recycled materials.
While merchandise is available for all manner of interests and hobbies, it’s most evident for music fans. Whether an international superstar like Taylor Swift or a small alternative band with niche appeal, crowds at music gigs routinely wear band t-shirts and merch to show their support for the artist they’re seeing.
With this in mind, the team at Purple Moon wanted to explore how much the music merch of our favourite bands and artists costs. We’ve scoured 50 major artists’ websites for price data across a range of merchandise items, but which has the most expensive merch?
The Average Cost of Artist Merch
Before diving into the most and least expensive artists for fan merchandise, it’s worth considering the average cost of merch across all the artists in our study. We’ve looked at the cost of their most recent vinyl album, as well as the cost of a t-shirt, hoodie and hat branded with either the new album or their generic artist name.
By far the most expensive merch item is a branded hoodie, which will set you back £69.80, on average. T-shirts are the next most expensive item, costing £32.19, while a new vinyl album costs £31.88, and a hat costs £30.20.
This brings the combined average cost of these popular merch items to £164.07, which can be quite expensive, depending on your personal spending power. On the other hand, this figure highlights the earning potential of merch for bands and artists, especially given the thousands of fans that can attend just a single performance of popular musical acts.
The Artists With The Most Expensive Merch
Chris Brown
Combined merch cost: £241.00
Days worked to save: 5.53
Chris Brown has the most expensive merch overall, costing £241.00 for a vinyl record, t-shirt, hoodie and hat. If the average UK adult wanted to buy all four items of merchandise in this study, it would take them 5.53 working days to save up enough money.
His most recent album, 11:11, released in November 2023, costs £39, which is £7.12 higher than the average price, while his t-shirts, also priced at £39, are £6.81 above the average.
At the other end of the scale, with the most affordable merch, is Metallica. The combined price for a hoodie, hat, t-shirt and vinyl album totals £110.55, giving their fans much better value for money when supporting the band by buying swag.
The Artists With The Most Expensive Vinyl Albums
Kanye West
Vinyl cost: £74.99
Kanye West has the most expensive vinyl, with his most recent Donda priced at £74.99. This is more than twice the average price of a vinyl album, which came to £31.88 across all the artists in our study. Released in 2021, Donda was Kanye’s last solo full album, though it was followed by an unfinished demo album, Donda 2, in 2022.
The next most expensive album is Frank Ocean’s Blonde, which is priced at £61, while the most affordable vinyl album is Red Hot Chilli Peppers’ Return of the Dream Canteen, which was released in 2022 and is priced at £19.99.
The Artists With The Most Expensive T-Shirts
Kanye West
T-shirt cost: £66.20
Kanye West’s t-shirts were the most expensive in our study. They cost fans £66.20 to purchase, more than double the average price of £32.19, and are more than 50% more expensive than any other t-shirt we looked at.
Four artists, AC/DC, Coldplay, Kendrick Lamar and The Killers, all tied for second place with their printed t-shirts priced at £40. T-shirts are possibly the most iconic and versatile item of music merch available, being worn to gigs and festivals, as well as in everyday life.
The Artists With The Most Expensive Hoodie
Drake
Hoodie cost: £167.27
Drake sells the most expensive hoodies, which cost fans £167.27 to purchase. This is more than twice the average price of a music merch hoodie, which is £69.80. The only other artist whose hoodies cost more than £100 is Chris Brown, selling them for £116. Beyoncé’s aren’t far behind this price point at £94.04.
The most affordable hoodies are sold by Metallica and are priced at £37.61, which is more than £30 cheaper than average. Other artists with affordable hoodies include Mitski and Foo Fighters, priced at £45.14 and £50, respectively.
The Artists With The Most Expensive Hats
Chris Brown
Hat cost: £47.00
The artist selling the most expensive hats is Chris Brown at £47 each, which is over 50% more expensive than the average price for a merch hat, £30.20. Bon Jovi, Kendrick Lamar and Post Malone all had the next most expensive hats, priced at £40 each.
Mitski sells the cheapest hats for £18.81, meaning you could buy two hats and still have almost £10 in change compared to buying a Chris Brown hat. The next most affordable hats are sold by Foo Fighters, priced at £19.99, and Arctic Monkeys, priced at £20.
Methodology
We wanted to explore the affordability and popularity of music artists’ merchandise in the UK.
We researched the cost of four popular merchandise items, vinyl records, hoodies, t-shirts and hats, across 50 artists to reveal which had the most expensive merch. These artists were selected using various articles from sources such as The Tab and Music Pie Chart.
We used each artist’s own website to find prices for each item. We always collected the price for the most recent album, or preorder if a new album was announced. If there were no vinyl albums available on the artist’s site, we collected this data from alternative sources such as HMV and Townsend Music.
We combined the cost of all four items, where available, into a single cost to reveal the artists with the most expensive merchandise.
Any prices given in USD were converted to GBP on 20/09/24 using xe.com.
We also calculated how long it would take the average person in the UK to save enough money to purchase all four merch items for each artist. We used the national average salary of £34,963, as stated by the ONS, as well as the average cost of living and average rent using data from Lending Stream and SpareRoom. We then used The Salary Calculator to find the average daily take-home pay and subtracted the essential expenses from that figure to find the average daily disposable income. This figure was used to calculate how many days of saving it would take to afford each artist’s collection of merch.
All data was collected in September 2024 and is correct as of then.
