I know that running a band or music group takes a lot of work. Worship bands, cover bands, wedding entertainment, and original music projects all have plenty in common when it comes to daily activities. They’ve all got to wrangle musicians, keep track of files, take care of clients, make recordings and so much more.
Even if you’ve got a team of dozens of people helping you manage your music project, effective software and apps will still save the day. After all, you probably didn’t start a music career so you could spend all you time fussing with running a business.
In this article, I have split up the field of band management into some crucial categories and reviewed some great apps for bands that can help you manage them.
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Before you commit to a bunch of band apps, make sure you know how easy it will be to collaborate with them.
Many apps charge much higher fees when you add more “admins” to your team. Some only allow collaboration once you pay. And some aren’t great for collaboration at all.
Ultimately, your goal should be to make your band so successful that you have a team of people managing it with you. But before that day comes, it’s all up to you (and your band apps)!
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If you can’t find band apps that make sharing your band’s workload and delegating tasks easy, you’ll start feeling overworked and underpaid. Your band will become another statistic before you know it!
In other words, you shouldn’t have to pray that your band mates will remember to “reply-all” each time you send a band email so that everyone stays in the loop. Your system should:
This band app was actually built for bands, by bandleaders. Designed with efficient communication at the core, Back On Stage is an all-in-one band app that you can’t be without. It’s my favourite!
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All your band’s communication happens on a per-gig basis, which makes keeping track of who-said-what-about-which-gig a breeze. Just open up the “Chat” tab on any booking page and type away.
All admins, as well as any musicians booked for that gig will see those chat messages. Each time someone posts, the post is time, date and name stamped, then each band member is sent an email notification.
I’m not alone in loving slack for team messaging. You can create themed (#hashtagged) conversations and add any number of your band mates to it.
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When someone posts a comment, it gets a time and name stamp, then push notifications get sent to app users and everyone in that conversation is notified.
Slack has a FREE plan that you can probably get by with. Otherwise it’s $8/month per active user if you need to upgrade for some reason.
It gets messy: I’ve seen bands using slack to communicate about everyone’s availability for gigs and rehearsals. They’ll have one conversation for #gigdates and another for #rehearsals.
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Once a few dates pile up for gigs and all 8 band members start replying, it results in a sh*tload of notifications getting sent to everyone and a really messy wall of data that the bandleader eventually has to painstakingly scroll through and sort out.
These guys are clearly trying to chew up some of Slack’s market space. I haven’t tried this myself, but it seems like it’s got pretty much all of Slack’s features, but at a lower cost - just $3/month instead of $8/month per active user.
The terms “chasing emails” and “buried in my inbox” should not even be part of your vocabulary. Get out of the dark ages.
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These were designed for simple informal communications between one or a few parties. Large and long conversations get awkward quickly. And god forbid some silly algorithm suddenly decides that your important client’s gig offer is spam!
Eesh! If you’re booking your band through text messages, I pity you. This is the fastest recipe for hair loss and sleepless nights.
Unfortunately, for some insane reason, I will say from experience that this is the most common method of communication for bandleaders trying to book their musicians for gigs.
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Don’t be seduced by it’s apparent ability to send messages rapidly. Losing track of scattered text message conversations is all too common. Don’t risk your band’s reputation over this organization-less communication medium!
Even with band apps like Slack or Back On Stage managing your gig and rehearsal communications effectively, nothing beats the familiar and efficient visual display of a calendar.
By far the best band organizer app when it comes to centralizing and sharing your band’s calendar. Just create new bookings and they’ll be added to your fancy dashboard calendar inside the app.
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These days, digital file sharing is central to running a band. Cover bands need to share reference recordings that they learn their arrangements from and original bands pass around recorded song ideas or their recorded performance versions.
Of course, you likely have lots of sheet music or lyric sheets, guitar tabs, or random song or performance notes too. Maybe you’ve even got videos you need your bandmates or subs to check out before a show.
They’re not just nice to have so that your bandmates are on the same page, but I believe they are possibly your band’s best insurance policy also.
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Imagine if your drummer (or other key player) gets in a serious accident a couple days before a show. Can your band hire a fill-in on a moment's notice and still perform?
But with an organized file system that you can share with a click, you could save your band’s show by providing a professional substitute with the reference recordings or sheet music they need to nail the gig.
Share gig and rehearsal info with bandmates: If all my band members are involved in EVERY gig, I would just create a band calendar and share that calendar with everyone. But if certain bookings only go to certain members, I’d do it a little differently.
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If I only want certain gigs going to certain band members, I would keep the calendar sharing limited to myself and any other band admins. Then I would just individually invite musicians (via the “add guests” feature) to each booking that they are involved with.
I’m a huge lover of Apple products, but I just don’t have space in my heart (or my iPhone) for this app anymore.
This is by far one of the best apps for bands to share files because you never have to go digging. Files are stored where you need them. If you need sheet music or recordings, they are attached to song cards inside the app. If you need gig-related files, they are attached directly to gigs.
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Gone are the days of having to organize your sheet music or recording in separate folders, sharing them with your musicians, hoping they’ll actually download them, then madly doing it all over again when you need to update something.
Before switching my band’s sheet Music Library to Back On Stage, I too was a Dropboxer. I had folders setup in Dropbox as follows:
This setup allowed me to quickly share specific sets of files with a new substitute player and give them everything they needed for a gig with my band.
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This is a great option for most. The 15BG of free storage space far outweighs the 2GB that you get for free with dropbox.
You could organize your Google Drive just as I outlined for Dropbox above and have a rock solid file storing and sharing solution for your band in no time.
Their dead simple interface just lets you send a file to one or more parties. No storage is provided though. It’s really just a one-off service.
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There are dozens of tasks that need to be accomplished for every gig. Keeping track of them and delegating them is key to your success.
In my opinion, Back On Stage is the best of the band apps when it comes to managing gig tasks. Gig tasks are often repetitive from gig to gig (so templates make life much easier), and the due dates of these tasks need to be relative to the booking date.
You can setup your own task templates and set each tasks due date as “relative to the booking date”. Now, when you get a new gig, just apply your task template and watch as all the due dates magically set themselves:
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A super clean and easy to use app. When I decided to switch to this for another project I was working on, it only took a few minutes to get setup and start sharing tasks with my teammates.
Google Sheets has a nice To-Do list template that makes getting started easy. You can even download the app on all your devices.
Back On Stage will contact each of your musicians, in the order you specify, until all responses have been received and your roster is full.
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Come back in a day or two and check the status of the Auto-Book of all your musicians by visiting the gig page and navigating to the Roles tab, like so:
As previously discussed, please save yourself the headache. Chasing emails and scrolling through pages and pages of text messages is a terrible way to run your business!
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