Is $20 for a t shirt expensive?
Modern screen printing technology has made it cheap to print graphic t shirts. Combined with the internet, which provides access to every graphic you could possibly want, it’s possible to print pretty much anything. Cheap t shirts abound. Why, then, do some t shirts cost $20? Materials are widely available. Screen printing is cheap. There’s a cornucopia of free images online. A $20 shirt seems almost absurd.
A legitimate, licensed Marvin the Martian shirt
But there are reasons why shirts cost that much, and the biggest one is licensing. It’s not just about goods and services. It’s not just about the material that the shirt is made of and the screen printing process. It’s also about the images, and that’s where the real snare is. Remember that today we live in an information economy. It’s not so much about raw materials anymore. At this point, we’re much more focused on information, on ideas. That’s where the money is. That’s where all the profit is. With most industrialized countries having switched to service economies instead of industrial ones, we’re all about ideas and information.
In order to make money off of ideas, you’ve got to have the idea of intellectual property. This is where we get things like trademarks and copyrights. This is also why we have things like digital rights management (DRM). A lot of people complain about this stuff. Every nerd knows that, back in the 1990s, there was a huge legal hullabaloo over Napster allowing people to download Metallica songs for free. The reason it’s in the news so much is that intellectual property is what our whole world is based on at the moment.
The truth is, though, this stuff is necessary. If your favorite artists, franchises, and brands are gonna exist, they have to make money. And there was a time before intellectual property. Back then, it was very hard for artists to make money. For example, the famous German author, Goethe, made very little money off of some of his books. He made little money even though they were selling well! The reason is that Goethe was writing back in the 1800s. And back then, there were no laws about intellectual property. As a result, even with many of his books being printed and sold, Goethe made little money. Most of that money went to the publishers.
As much of a pain as intellectual property laws can be, they’re important. Not just for the studios and companies and publishers, but for the artists and musicians and actors, for the creators. Those laws and licensing regulations protect the people who create the art you love. $20 might be a lot for a t-shirt, but it’s a worthwhile price to pay to support your favorite creators.
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