Chicago artists launch project pairing new music with green tea

By Melissa Bordeau

Andy Angelos & Phil Lomac

Remember the days you would get so excited to purchase a newly released CD? You’d listen to the music as you flipped through the album artwork, amazed by the beautiful cover art and photography? Today, the popular way of obtaining music is to go onto iTunes and hit purchase; the artistic format that once was there is diminishing. But thanks to Chicago-based Andy Angelos and Phil Lomac there is a new way to obtain your music that keeps the artistic value alive.

Angelos and Lomac created Tea for Tyrants, an innovative idea of distributing music along with tasty green tea and a collectible tea card.

The Tea for Tyrants project was launched on January 14th, with around 20 days currently left to reach its $7,500 goal via Kickstarter in order for the initial product run to take flight. 

In the meantime, find out more information about the project in our interview below with Andy Angelos.

WCR: How did you come up with the idea of pairing tea with music?

AA: Phil Lomac and I are both life-long musicians and were preparing to launch a new EP last spring. The typical approach to launching an album had been 1) Make downloads available online 2) Host shows or tours 3) Hope to gain some traction via iTunes, Spotify, etc and collect some paltry royalties. This method is really frustrating and usually demonstrates the predicament of independent musicians – the supposed “ease” of information distribution online is countered by an abundance of choice and scarcity of attention to make developing an audience difficult.

So the idea stemmed from frustration with current options and a desire to attach music to a product that people would purchase regardless of their familiarity with our music. Just get the music into their hands. Tea was a logical product since we both had experience as consumers and connoisseurs of the product.

Kickstarter seemed to be a good platform to gauge interest and raise some funds for the initial product run (tea and packaging).