Michaela Anne Has a Merch Sale Horror Story. She Knows Other Touring Artists Do Too

Singer-songwriter Michaela Anne just may be the quintessential indie artist, one for whom the hustle never stops. She’s a working mom, a podcast host with her husband and bandmate, Aaron Shafer-Haiss, and the one in charge of keeping her music coming.

Michaela Anne, the daughter of a military father who moved around for the bulk of her childhood, eventually settled in Brooklyn, then Nashville. Now she’s on the move again: She’ll perform this July 4th weekend at Rolling Stone’s Stateside Festival, headlined by Noah Kahan, in Kingston, New York.

The festival stop is just one of many live dates she’ll play this summer in support of her new album, These Are the Days. It’s a completely independent release — Michaela Anne crowd-funded the LP too — that she will, like so many touring artists, be selling at the merch table after her shows. But getting the album, T-shirts, and other swag to the venues can often be a struggle. In a new interview with Rolling Stone’s Nashville Now podcast, Michaela Anne recounts one merch “debacle” that left her in tears.

While on a run with the band Fantastic Cat, Michaela Anne wowed the audience in the very first city she played and they bought up every copy of These Are the Days she had brought along — in a second suitcase that she paid to check with the airline, filled with 50 pounds of vinyl. She suddenly needed more to sell at the upcoming shows.

“I had my husband overnight a box of merch, $325, to Columbus [Ohio], the next morning. There were storms here in Tennessee, so it didn’t arrive. And if it’s a storm, it’s an ‘Act of God,’ so they won’t refund you. Then I don’t have any merch to sell,” Michaela Anne says. “I’m adding up all the potential dollars that I could have made, and now I’ve spent. It was so stressful.”

Eventually, the new merch was set to arrive, but the package store’s policy wouldn’t accept “Hold for Pickup” boxes. In other words, the songwriter had to be there as soon as the shipment arrived. She tried to plead her case to the manager.

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“He said, ‘Nope. I’m not going to do it. If I do it for you, I have to do it for everybody,’” she recalls. “I said, ‘Sir, can I please tell you my story? I’m a touring musician. The only way I make a living is from my merch sales, I have two young children at home’ …and I started to cry.”

The manager relented, not because of Michaela Anne’s tears, she says, but because he simply listened. “It’s a testament to the power of storytelling,” she says, “that it builds empathy and connects us to each other. He became invested… Later, I was getting coffee and that man called me: ‘Guess what I have waiting for you?’”

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According to Michaela Anne, her story is similar to that of countless other musicians who, for various reasons, are finding it increasingly difficult to tour. Watch her full interview on Nashville Now below.

Download and subscribe to Rolling Stone’s weekly country-music podcast, Nashville Now, hosted by Deputy Editor, Head of Country Joseph Hudak, on Apple Podcasts or Spotify (or wherever you get your podcasts). New episodes drop every Wednesday and feature interviews with artists and personalities like Vince Gill, Lainey Wilson, Shaboozey, Hardy, Charley Crockett, Tedeschi Trucks Band, Kings of Leon, Dan Auerbach of the Black Keys, the Black Crowes, Carly Pearce, Amy Grant, Luke Grimes, Brandon Lake, Breland, Bryan Andrews, Noeline Hofmann, Adam Mac, Devon Gilfillian, Gavin Adcock, Amanda Shires, Shooter Jennings, Margo Price, Ink, Ne-Yo, Rival Sons’ Jay Buchanan, Halestorm, Dusty Slay, Lukas Nelson, Ashley Monroe, Old Crow Medicine Show’s Ketch Secor, Clever, Love on the Spectrum‘s Tyler White, Willie Nelson scholar John Spong, and authors Marissa R. Moss, Josh Crutchmer, Mark Gray, and Jonathan Bernstein.