Work/Joon

Streaming infrastructure, merch, and fan commerce.

Client — Joon  ·  2025–2026  ·  Catalog · Commerce · Fan Experience

The Problem with Patchwork Infrastructure

Joon had 22 releases across four years and no clean way to present them. The catalog existed in fragments — some releases on one platform, art assets scattered across services, no unified storefront. Every time a new single dropped, someone had to manually update multiple places.

A catalog of 22 releases is evidence of sustained, serious work. It should communicate that immediately. Fragmented infrastructure communicates the opposite.

The Catalog

The catalog is a typed data structure: name, release date, cover art URL, Spotify link. Version-controlled with the codebase. When a new single drops, one record gets added. The gallery, the discography, and any associated merch update automatically.

Cover art lives on Shopify’s CDN, the same infrastructure handling product images for the store. The catalog and the commerce share a single infrastructure layer and stay in sync because they’re the same system.

Fan Commerce

The store runs through Shopify’s Storefront API — decoupled from Shopify’s theme layer, visually continuous with the catalog. A fan browsing releases and a fan shopping for merch are in the same experience. The same visual language, the same typography, the same sense of the artist’s world.

Release-tied merch is linked at the data level through Shopify collection metafields. When a release goes up with associated merch, the connection is already there. No manual wiring required.

Streaming Attribution

Each release in the catalog carries a direct Spotify link. A fan who finds a release through the website can be listening in one click — no search, no ambiguity about which version to stream.

An independent artist’s algorithmic reach is calibrated by signal quality — streams that come through direct attribution from the artist’s own site register as genuine fan engagement. Making that path as short as possible isn’t a UX detail. It’s part of how the catalog grows.

Infrastructure That Scales

Independent artists face the same problem every growing DTC brand eventually hits: the tools you start with don’t scale, and the manual work compounds with every release. Adding a product shouldn’t mean updating five places.

Joon can put out a record and have a professional-grade web presence update around it in the time it takes to add one line to a file. That’s the standard every DTC brand’s infrastructure should be held to: zero operational overhead per release.