My favorite example of this is Joy Division. They’re the band with that cool white-on-black ridge line plot shirt. If you haven’t listened to their music before, go check it out. You probably won’t like it very much. I don’t know how many records or shirts they sold, but their ratio of shirts sold to records sold has to be one of the wildest.
That's a band I have seen mentioned here on HN quite a bit, but I have never heard of anywhere else. I proably do know a couple of their songs but just in a way that I would say "I've heard that before" not that I would be able to say "oh that's Joy Division."
Has anybody recently interviewed Ian Curtis to get his thoughts about their shirt sales?
The bulk of those shirts have got to be pirated, but for a while they were selling them at Bandy Melville, a clothing store whose target demographic has seemingly very little overlap with fans of Joy Division. The ultimate triumph of the signifier over the signified.