 One of the biggest complaints I hear about music today is you have to release so many singles, which means you have to make single artwork. That is single-screen video, then a lyric video, and then a music video. It's all just too much work for some people. Like, who has time for this? Well, probably you who built a whole Midget Quaker village in Minecraft the other night. But I know that e-girl didn't notice you built that, so now you need to keep working on your music career, so maybe she'll see you. Best of luck! So, what I want to talk about in this video is what I like to call a full-stack single, which not only makes your life easier since it reinforces all your imagery to fans. It saves creative time and makes everything you do synergistic, and it also helps you seem like an artist fans should pay attention to. Hi, I'm Jesse Cannon, a music marketing consultant who makes videos about how to build your fanbase from 0 to 10,000 fans, and this is MuseFormation. So, let's talk about what I like to call a full-stack single. So, the idea here is you're going to develop an image that goes along with your single. We want to find some 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, and if you haven't heard me make this point before, about that you should spend 10% of your time brainstorming your music videos and the imagery around your music. Well, now you have. So, we want to figure out this image, and it'll be one that you use to tell stories around your music. This will include making merch, your single cover, and using it in your video, and of course, your social media. This practice will not only up how professional you look, but it will also save you some effort and reinforce your image all at the same time. But let's talk about how this really does help reinforce you to fans and show them why they take this so much more seriously. Since I'm a big nerd who wrote a book on creativity, I really like the idea of emotional resonance, which is there's this level of emotion you feel when you see, feel, hear, or experience art. Particularly, I discuss it a lot with how it pertains to whether or not you feel a song or not. One of the things I've observed is that many of the most avid music fans, you know, the ones who music is their whole life, and they are this way because music just hits them so much harder emotionally than everyone else. I'm one of those people, as I will happily admit, 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 from them too. But where I'm going with this is even when you're not some weirdo like me that balls crying at Charlie XCX videos on their couch at 1am. Even when you're an average listener, you still get more blown away when the artists you love match the things they do musically with a visually impacted image. Now when you go to release a single, and since I've encouraged you to release tons of them, there's so much work to do between the video, the artwork, and what if you could find synergy to bring all that together to not only save you effort, but also to make your fans feel your music more. And that's what the full stack single is. But let's talk about what this looks like and where you've seen it before. When the 1935 released their single for the birthday party, they executed the full stack single perfectly. Not only did they feature the image of their single art in their video, there was also a t-shirt immediately on sale. Not only that, but they launched their mindshower.ai site that was based around the visuals of the video, it was an experiential virtual reality site where fans could access zine stems and other cool content around the group. They did similar with the single people where they had a t-shirt for the video which was similar to the artwork along with the launch of an Instagram filter to go with it so that fans would have something experiential to spread the song with. And they have done this in the past too with sincerity is scary. Putting the stupid looking hat Maddie was wearing in the video on sale in their merch store. I would also be remiss to not talk about the group who I saw execute this idea on a god tier level, which is sleep token. They released seven singles before their debut album Sundowning. Each one had its own symbol and limited merch for sale as well as having the image of the singles cover art in the video. Seriously sleep tokens merch store and strategy to harness algorithmic discovery for this record was above and beyond anything I saw in the last year. They even sell a print 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. Now you may be thinking that there's no way that you have the money to print t-shirts like this for each design, but just remember these designs can live online and if you use a print on demand service like manic merch or threadless, you can do it without putting any money down and use it to have money to fund your next singles promotion. Let's also remember just like we talked about in my video on Instagram tips, which is linked in the description or in a card now. You could also make this image a sticker and put the title with it to put in all of your Instagram stories that don't promote it so that you're always promoting the single with that little sticker that reminds people they could be listening to your song and building their relationship with your music As well, if you're trying to drive up sales on the billboard chart, remember 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, but that's probably another story for another time. The other reason this strategy works so well is drop culture, where merch is available for a short duration, which has driven so many merch sales in recent years. While in-roch 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, and that scarcity then makes fans prioritize buying that merch instead of something else they were going to buy. In a full stack single, you can make the merch only available for the eight weeks you're promoting your single and then move on to the next single drop. Let's also remember 99% of the time fans' enthusiasm for a song is usually highest right when they hear it, so taking advantage of this enthusiasm and trying to sell them something special while they're feeling that passion and know it may go away in a little while can 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 so much. See you in the next video. Am I missing anything? Is there any other way you would have done this? I need to know your questions and what no one else is telling you since I want to answer them, so leave them in the comments since I answer every comment in every post. I hope you liked this video and if you did please like, subscribe and get notified. And I'm gonna be breaking down the concepts in this video along with how to promote your music and how to make songs you're happy with in the future. I have a Facebook group linked below that is only helpful information. No playlist or con artists, only artists having helpful discussions allowed. If you want to learn more about me, work on a record with me or check out any of my books, podcasts or anything else I do, go to jessecanon.com or at jessecanon.com on all the socials. One last thing, there's two playlists here. One is on how to grow your fan base from zero to 10,000 fans and the other is on how you promote your music with Spotify. Or you can hit the subscribe button below and stay tuned as I have tons of tips for musicians.