Dua Lipa is the latest in a flurry of artists to file lawsuits in the US seeking to stop the sale of knock-off merchandise, in this case by bootleggers looking to cash in on her current ‘Radical Optimism Tour’.
That tour “has just begun and so have defendants’ infringing activities”, a legal filing declares. And not only is the unofficial merch being sold outside Lipa’s shows of “inferior quality”, it is “injuring or likely to injure the reputation” of the singer, a reputation that she earned through hard work and the “virtue of her public performances”.
It’s actually Sony Music’s merch business Ceremony Of Roses that has gone legal, it having the rights to sell official merchandise that utilises Lipa’s visuals, trademarks and brand. The company recently filed a very similar lawsuit seeking to block the sale of unofficial Benson Boone merch alongside shows on his US tour.
Live Nation-owned Merch Traffic has also recently gone legal over the sale of unofficial merchandise outside Tate McRae shows. It managed to secure an injunction allowing it to seize counterfeit merch being sold within four miles of McRae’s current concerts.
All of this is a reminder that for many artists merchandise is now a significant revenue stream, both as part of touring activity, but also online as the music industry continues to try to capitalise on the superfan opportunity. What is also notable is the ease and speed with which bootleg merch can now be manufactured and distributed.
Whereas previously a big challenge for the music industry was bootleg recordings - powered by advances in technology that made large scale duplication of cassettes and CDs simple and affordable - similar advances in garment printing mean that anyone with simple and widely available kit can now set themselves up as a merch bootlegger.
Two other recent lawsuits seeking to stop the sale of unofficial merch - filed by Twenty One Pilots and the estate of late rapper MF Doom - targeted the bargain-basement Chinese e-commerce dropshipping platform Temu, filing legal claims against its US subsidiary Whaleco Inc.
After launching in the US in September 2022, Temu scaled rapidly. In October last year the FT reported that the platform was fast approaching Amazon in terms of users, while a Wired report at the end of 2024 said that the Temu website was attracting nearly 700 million visits a month worldwide.
The Twenty One Pilots lawsuit insists that Temu “is known to exercise iron clad control over what products are sold on its platform”, and yet some of those products infringe the copyrights and trademarks of American artists.
Having what can often appear like official merch being sold on Temu by unofficial sellers can also harm the reputation of artists, that lawsuit claimed, because the e-commerce site “regularly markets, sells, and ships products that are offensive and problematic”, including clothing with artwork that “endorses homophobia” and “incites violence and violent criminal gang activity”.
Because Temu has a US corporate entity, it is a bit easier to sue the company through the American courts. However, with products sold on the site thought to be mainly shipped directly from China, it may not be as easy to use the judicial process to stop the sale of that counterfeit merch as with the t-shirts being sold outside venues at US concerts.