We present the shift-dimension of multipersistence modules and investigate its algebraic properties. This gives rise to a new invariant of multigraded modules over the multivariate polynomial ring arising from the hierarchical stabilization of the zeroth total multigraded Betti number. We give a fast algorithm for the computation of the shift-dimension of interval modules in the bivariate case. We construct multipersistence contours that are parameterized by multivariate functions and hence provide a large class of feature maps for machine learning tasks.