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The Full Stack Single: How to Make Your Imagery Work Harder

One of the biggest complaints about music marketing today is the sheer volume of content required for a single release. You need single artwork, a single screen video, a lyric video, a music video—it's an overwhelming amount of work. Some artists wonder who has time for this. Well, probably you, since you just built an entire Quaker village in Minecraft the other night. But that e-girl didn't notice, so now you need to keep working on your music career. Maybe she'll see you then—best of luck.

I want to talk about what I call a full-stack single. This approach makes your life easier by reinforcing your imagery for fans, saves creative time, makes everything you do more synergistic, and helps you seem like an artist fans should pay attention to.

Developing Strong Visual Identity

The idea here is developing an image that goes along with your single. Find strong imagery—whether that's you in a certain outfit, a symbol, a pose, a painting, a sculpture, or whatever you can do to reinforce the emotion of your song that feels synergistic with how it sounds. This may take some time to brainstorm. You should spend 10% of your time brainstorming your music videos and the imagery around your music.

Figure out this image and use it to tell stories around your music. This includes making merch, your single cover, using it in your video, and posting it across your social media. This practice ups how professional you look while saving effort and reinforcing your image all at the same time.

Why Visual Consistency Matters

This really does help reinforce you to fans and show them why they should take you seriously. As a big nerd who wrote a book on creativity, I like the idea of emotional resonance—there's this level of emotion you feel when you see, feel, hear, or experience art. I discuss it a lot with whether or not you feel a song.

Many of the most avid music fans—the ones for whom music is their whole life—are this way because music hits them harder emotionally than everyone else. I'm one of those people. I cry whenever I see an amazing piece of art. I mean, cry like a little kid who's just had their favorite toy taken away. But even when you're not some weirdo like me that balls crying at Ninajirachi videos on their couch at 1 am, even average listeners get more blown away when the artists they love match what they do musically with a visually impactful image.

When you go to release a single, there's so much work to do between the video and the artwork. What if you could find synergy to bring all that together to not only save effort but also make your fans feel your music more? That's what the full-stack single is.

Enjoying this? Forward it to a music friend you’d like to be closer to and start a discussion!

The 1975's Execution

When The 1975 released their single "The Birthday Party," they executed the full-stack single perfectly.

They featured the image of their single art in their video and immediately had a t-shirt on sale.

They launched their mindshower.ai site based around the visuals of the video—an experiential virtual reality site where fans could access zines, stems, and other cool content around the group.

They did something similar with the single "People"—they had a t-shirt for the video similar to the artwork, along with the launch of an Instagram filter so fans would have something experiential to spread the song with.

They've done this in the past, too, with "Sincerity is Scary," putting the stupid-looking rabbit hat Matty was wearing in the video on sale in their merch store.

Sleep Token's God-Tier Strategy

Sleep Token executed this idea on a god-tier level. Before their debut album Sundowning, they released three standalone singles in 2018. Then, for Sundowning's rollout in 2019, they released each of the album's twelve tracks progressively—one every two weeks at sundown in the UK—with each song getting its own symbol and limited merch for sale. Each track had the image of the single's cover art in its visualizer.

Sleep Token's merch store and strategy for harnessing algorithmic discovery for this record was above and beyond anything I saw that year. They even sell prints of each of the images since fans build deep bonds with their music and want to feel close to it, so they allow them to pay a lot of money to get deeper with what they have.

Making It Work Without a Budget

You may be thinking there's no way you have the money to print t-shirts like this for each design. Just remember, these designs can live online if you use a print-on-demand service like Printify. You can do it without putting any money down and use it to fund your next single's promotion.

Chart Strategy and Drop Culture

If you're trying to drive up sales on the Billboard chart, remember that bundling these pieces of merch with the single allows you to generate sales from it, which weighs a ton and can help you place higher. Using a merch site like Bandcamp, this can be accomplished super easily.

The other reason this strategy works so well is drop culture, where merch is available for a short duration. This has driven massive merch sales in recent years. While in rock culture drops are less common than in hip-hop and EDM, you basically make merch only available for 24 hours or in a limited quantity. That scarcity makes fans prioritize buying that merch over something else they were gonna buy.

In a full-stack single, you can make the merch only available for the eight weeks you're promoting your single, then move on to the next single drop. Remember, 99% of the time fans' enthusiasm for a song is highest right when they hear it. Taking advantage of this enthusiasm and trying to sell them something special while they're feeling that passion—knowing it may go away in a little while—could be especially helpful to sell them these walking advertisements that your merch is and help fund your next single.

Take advantage of the full-stack single before everyone is doing it, since it is the future.

Thanks for reading.