Originally shared in The Scoop, a weekly email on what's working in direct-to-fan. Subscribe to get stories like this in your inbox every Friday.
My Morning Jacket have been one of America's most beloved live bands for 25 years. Their fanbase is the real deal. People share presale codes with strangers in chatrooms. They leave comments on a 2005 Fillmore clip asking for a 4K remaster.
So when a band with this level of fan devotion makes a major infrastructure move, it's worth paying attention to.
The problem they were solving
The band had been running a fan community called One Big Family through a third-party superfan app. It was active, fans were showing up, the band was present. But over time, the setup became more fragmented than it needed to be.
In their announcement to fans, the band was direct about why they moved: they wanted one permanent home for the community, integrated with the website, store, and touring page. They were tired of the platform changing on them and tired of stitching together tools to make everything function.
What they did
They consolidated everything onto Shopify with Single. Website, store, fan community, touring, email, all at mymorningjacket.com. One site, fully owned and operated by the band.
There's a reason this matters beyond just simplifying the admin. When your website and store are separate, the place where fans actually spend time and the place where they can actually buy something are disconnected. We've seen artists where the primary website gets 2,500% more traffic than the store. That's a massive amount of attention that never makes it anywhere near a purchase. Consolidating fixes that. (We wrote more on this here.)
Why this keeps happening
My Morning Jacket aren't an outlier. This is the third fan community migration Single has helped facilitate this month alone. And the pattern is consistent: artists don't start out fragmented on purpose.
A Patreon launches because it's the easiest way to start a fan club. A Discord spins up because fans are already there. A store runs on Shopify while the website lives on Squarespace. Each decision is reasonable in isolation.
But over time, the most engaged fans end up scattered across systems that don't connect. It becomes harder to manage, and critically, none of it compounds back into the artist's core business.
The question worth asking
Where is your fan community sitting right now? Is it connected to everything else you're building, or floating on its own?
If it's floating, you're not alone. Most artists we talk to are in the exact same spot. The good news is it's fixable, and it doesn't have to be a massive lift to get there.
If you want to talk through what consolidating looks like for your artist, get in touch with our team. And if you want more stories like this one, The Scoop lands every Friday.
