Blog

Being able to leverage historical data is no longer just a competitive advantage in the music industry — it’s a necessity for crafting strategies that stand out in a saturated market. 

Understanding how to leverage this data is crucial for organizations at every level — from DIY bands to solo managers to record labels, talent management agencies, publishers, and more.

Unfortunately, the generic business management tools currently in use by many in our space fail to account for the unique needs of our industry, like providing the ability to capture and recall past campaign and event data, pointing to the need for industry-specific tools and processes.

Dedicated music business management software like Artist Growth Workspace changes that, empowering teams to analyze past performances, audience engagement, and campaign success so that they can make better and more informed decisions.

Here, we explore music business management platforms beyond their role as efficiency tools. As historical event and campaign databases, they provide valuable insights that management teams can use to plan better, more effective marketing and promotional campaigns, tours, partnerships, collaborations, and more.

Why the music industry needs dedicated management software

What does your artist management tech stack look like? 

For many, word documents, spreadsheets, and even paper-based workflows are still the norm, with communications spread messily across texts, emails, phone calls, and Slack messages. Others rely on ill-fitting project management tools that do many things, but fail to deliver on the promise of greater productivity. As a result, information is routinely lost or miscommunicated.

The cost of all of this is enormous.

According to a 2022 survey, companies lose as much as $1.3 million dollars a year to inefficient tasks and processes each year. And as a whole, U.S. businesses lose more than $3 trillion annually due to poor data. 

There’s also another cost, one that’s more difficult to quantify: The cost of falling behind.

Despite music’s pervasive presence in our lives, the industry itself has often been slow to change. While great strides have been made to collect data from various touch points (think ticket sales, streaming, etc.), the industry has taken a much slower approach to collecting and structuring operational data.

In order to stay ahead of the curve, music businesses must embrace new and disruptive technologies to address their unique operational needs. Music business management software is one such technology.

Unlike one-size-fits-all project management tools, a tool like Artist Growth Workspace enables artists’ teams to manage activities, data, events, and finances in a single, permission-based platform the entire team can rally around. By consolidating and streamlining every aspect of artist management, businesses are able to not only improve communication and efficiency, in the process reducing costs, but also look to historical data to make better decisions.

5 ways music business management software improves efficiency and productivity

Efficiency and productivity are paramount when teams are constantly being asked to do more with less. Here are five ways music business software can help:

1. Time savings

By templatizing repetitive tasks, such as event scheduling, music business management software frees up valuable time for artist managers, labels, and more. This is time that can be better spent on strategic activities that drive artists’ careers forward.

2. Streamlined workflows

Tools like Workspace provide a centralized platform that brings together all aspects of artist management, eliminating the need for multiple tools and manual processes. Individuals and teams can access and manage everything from contact information to event details to guest ticket requests in one place, streamlining workflows and reducing the risk of errors or oversights.

3. Improved organization

Music management software enables teams to organize activities, events, and other data in a structured and systematic manner. The event and campaign database serves as a central repository for all relevant information, making it easy to find and retrieve data quickly. This improves organization, making it easier to uncover insights and even locate past data when team members move on.

4. Enhanced collaboration

Artist management software facilitates collaboration among team members, artists, and external stakeholders, ensuring that everyone involved can work together seamlessly in the pursuit of common goals. This enhanced collaboration fosters creativity, efficiency, and synergy among various teams representing different aspects of an artist’s career.

5. Data-driven decision-making

Data is invaluable for making informed decisions and optimizing strategies. Music business software, with its database of past campaigns and events, enables teams to gain valuable insights into past performances, marketing campaigns and other promotions, internal ticket spend, and more.

Why an event and campaign database is essential to making data-driven decisions

Historical data in the music industry encompasses a wide array of information, from previous concert performances and tour successes to detailed records of marketing campaigns and promotional activities. Within all of this data lies the key to:

• Understanding what resonates with audiences
• Identifying trends over time
• Recognizing patterns that can inform future strategies 
• Creating new, more efficient processes

By analyzing your campaign and event database, you can pinpoint successful elements that can be replicated or adapted to current and future projects.

Enhancing event planning and management

Information on past event logistics, audience demographics, ticket sales, guarantees, and venue capacities can guide organizers in choosing the right venues, optimizing ticket pricing strategies, and enhancing audience experiences, and determining lineups that draw larger crowds.

Tailoring marketing strategies for maximum impact

By evaluating the outcomes of past campaigns, including promotions, advertising pushes, and event sponsorships, marketers can create more personalized, effective marketing campaigns that achieve better engagement and ROI.

Fostering artist development and growth

Insights gained from past performances, album releases, and promotional activities offer a roadmap for developing an artist's brand and sound. It also enables targeted investment in projects with the highest potential for success, making resource allocation easier.

Choosing the right music business management software

The right management software can revolutionize your business, but the wrong tools can set you back. To help you select the right software, here are some tips to consider:

Identify your needs

Every company, team, and individual has unique requirements based on their artists, career goals, and working style. Before choosing a business management tool, identify your needs and prioritize the features that are most important to you.

Consider scalability

Unless you’re an individual artist, you're probably looking to grow your roster. Look for platforms that offer flexible pricing plans and can accommodate a growing number of artists and team members. It's also crucial that you're able to specify what individual users can access, edit, and so on, making permissions controls an important consideration.

Evaluate ease of use

Did you know that six in 10 leaders report poor experiences with digital tools as a contributing factor in employee turnover?

A user-friendly interface is crucial for maximizing productivity, minimizing learning curves, and attracting and retaining employees. Test out the software's user interface. Is it easy to navigate? How quickly can you can perform common tasks, such as creating events, requesting guest passes, or exporting itineraries?

Research customer support

Effective customer support and training resources are essential for a smooth onboarding process and ensuring ongoing usage. Look for comprehensive documentation, tutorials, new feature announcements, and responsive customer support.

Consider integrations

Integrations with tools like Bandsintown for Artists, Songkick, Google Calendar, iCal, etc., can eliminate countless hours of manual event entry and reduce errors. Consider the integrations currently offered, and if you don’t see one that’s important to you, reach out and ask. It could be that it’s on the roadmap or alert the team to the need for a future integration.

Read more: 10 Questions You Should Ask When Choosing Artist Management Software

Building a future on the foundation of the past

The music industry's future is increasingly data-driven. Leveraging technologies like music business management software enables artists’ teams to store and recall historical campaign and event information, transforming raw data into actionable insights. 

These insights not only inform immediate strategic decisions but also contribute to a long-term vision that anticipates shifts in consumer behavior and market dynamics. By embracing a data-driven culture, industry professionals can navigate the complexities of the market with greater confidence and precision. The future of music lies in understanding its past. Those who harness this power will lead the way in innovation and success.

All of your artists’ activities, events, data, and finances in one platform

We created AG Workspace because — as artists and industry professionals ourselves — we found the existing tools inadequate for the needs of our industry.

Try Workspace free to see what dedicated music business management software can do for your productivity, data organization, and decision-making.

‍

We’re proud to announce a significant milestone in our journey: The translation of our Workspace artist management platform into Spanish and Portuguese. 

This expansion reflects the diverse footprint of the music industry and the wide range of artists, labels, management groups, and publishers that rely on Artist Growth Workspace to manage their operations.

Why this matters now

The introduction of Spanish and Portuguese translations — with many more on the way — is a crucial step toward making our Workspace artist management platform accessible to music and entertainment professionals across the globe.

And it made a lot of sense to start with these two languages. Consider the following statistics:

• Spanish is now the second most consumed language for music.
• Brazil’s music market revenue grew for the sixth consecutive year, in 2022.
• Latin music saw 21.9% year of year growth between 2022 and 2023.

How Workspace translations work

Initially, the preferred language indicated in your web browser settings will determine which language you see in Workspace on desktop. 

However, look for future updates that give users even greater flexibility, including:

• The ability to toggle between languages 
• Workspace mobile app translations
• Foreign currency support
• Additional language translations

Looking ahead to additional translations

While the debut of Workspace in Spanish and Portuguese is a significant milestone in the evolution of AG Workspace, it’s just the beginning of a much larger effort. 

Over the coming months, we plan on adding many more languages, including Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, and Polish — underscoring our mission to empower every creator and media company with the business tools they need to cultivate success.

Greater collaboration for the music industry

With the introduction of multiple language translations, we’re creating a more connected industry — one in which all of an artists’ teams can collaborate around a single shared source of truth. Across borders, languages, and time zones.

Try Workspace free for 14 days to see how it can improve collaboration across your teams.

With 120,000 tracks published to streaming services every day, the work music marketing and promotion teams do to help their artists stand out is more vital than ever. 

So to help you do more with the time and resources you have, we’re sharing 7 easy-to-implement time-management strategies for record label marketing and promotion teams.

1. Streamline your communications

Ever wonder how much time gets wasted due to poor communication?

Grammarly did, and what they found should concern any business leader… On average, poor communication costs every one of us 7.47 hours a week. Almost an entire day each week!

Equally concerning? Many of the tools created to help us could be hindering us.

Emails, calls, texts, and Slacks create a disjointed flow of information. Key details get lost in lengthy threads or miscommunicated in rushed messages. People forget what they talked about in meetings. The list goes on.

To prevent this, consider establishing dedicated Slack channels for specific projects (and setting ground rules for how they should be used), standardizing status updates, and sharing meeting summaries. (There are tons of AI tools that can transcribe and summarize meetings for you.) 

Tools like Grammarly can also help ensure that the email or document you’re sending is clear and succinct.

Additionally, collaborative platforms can be a game-changer, allowing you to store all of your data in one place so nothing gets lost.

Artist Growth Workspace, for example, is an industry-specific events and project management platform that lets users:

• Manage shared artist and roster calendars
• Request and approve promo requests 
• Store notes, contracts, and other critical information
• Request tickets, passes, and guest list access
• Upload receipts to a shared financial ledger
• Associate important contacts with events, such as streaming and radio

You can also access it while offline, ensuring that everyone is aligned around a single source of truth, whether or not they have an internet connection at the moment.

2. Rethink meetings

How many meetings have you attended that, as the saying goes, could have been an email?

If you said half, then you guessed correctly. Of the 31 hours on average that we spend in meetings each month, employees report feeling that half of that time was wasted.

Sure, there will always be times when a meeting or call is needed. But much of the time they’re just not necessary.

So what can you do?

For one, be selective about what optional meetings you attend. Ask yourself: Will anything relevant to my job be covered, or am I going just to be seen?

Or if you’re the one scheduling the call, consider whether it might be more effective conducted asynchronously. That is, via written updates.

And if a meeting is necessary? Be sure to share an agenda in advance. That way everyone has the opportunity to come prepared.

3. Centralize your artists’ events and data

Can you tell, at a glance, where your artists will be and what they’re doing? What about their data? Is it all in one place?

If not, you could be missing out on valuable opportunities for your artists. Not to mention, juggling multiple calendars, documents, and databases is a giant time suck and can lead to mistakes.

With dedicated record label management software, your entire team can access all of your artists’ activity, data, events, finances, and more in a single, permission-based system. (Meaning you control who can access and edit what information.)

Planning a radio campaign to coincide with an upcoming album release or tour? Or maybe you’re looking for opportunities to cross-promote artists with similar fan demographics? 

Workspace can help you keep track of it all. You can even use it to request guest passes to your artists’ events with built-in workflows you won’t find in generic project management tools. 

Read more: 10 Questions You Should Ask When Choosing Artist Management Software

4. Manage distractions

Feel like you’re constantly being interrupted? According to a 2022 study by Next Work Innovation, you are! About 15 times an hour, in fact. 

It's a recipe for reduced productivity, increased mistakes, and elevated stress.

You're not powerless, though! While you’ll never be able to prevent every interruption, you can rein them in by:

• Checking your email only at set times each day
• Evaluating whether you need to be in chat groups or email distribution lists
• Blocking out time for specific tasks (more on that in a moment)
• Resisting the temptation to reply to messages and emails right away
• Setting time limits on apps you don’t use for work
• Muting non-essential notifications

You may also want to try using a timer or productivity app.

One time management strategy, the Pomodoro technique, involves alternating 25-minute work sessions and five-minute breaks with longer breaks at certain intervals. However, there are many different time-based productivity strategies that can help maintain focus. Try a few to see what works for you.

5. Batch similar tasks

We mentioned blocking out time for specific tasks, but it’s worth taking a closer look at how batching similar tasks can increase your productivity and … happiness? 

That's right, people who get more done are 52% more likely to report feeling like they had a good day at work.

By getting in the habit of lumping together similar tasks — responding to emails, conducting outreach, writing online ads, analyzing streaming data, etc. — even for short periods of time, you’ll find it easier to avoid what researchers call “goal switching.” 

Basically, goal switching is when you jump from one task to another before completing the first, and it can cost a person up to 40% of their potential efficiency. In an eight-hour day, that’s just over three hours!

6. Templatize workflows and processes

Streamlining operations through templatization is another strategy that lends itself well to the marketing and promotion functions of a label.

For example, creating ready-made templates for press releases, pitch and marketing emails, and social media posts allows quick customization without the need to start over every time.

Just be careful to avoid overusing templates. For this reason, you should consider building a library of templates.

Likewise, applying standardized checklists and project plans to marketing and promotional activities ensures that all necessary steps are taken while minimizing time spent building project plans.

This is also an area where an industry-specific management tool like AG Workspace helps.

Workspace features built-in workflows for requesting and managing guest passes and tickets, as well as a dedicated promotions request workflow. Plus, you can create your own custom event schedule templates for streamlining the management and communication of activities and other events.

7. Look for new ways to leverage data

Data is crucial for every record label’s marketing and promotion departments.

While there’s certainly no shortage of tools for tracking and measuring marketing spend, ad efficacy, streaming data, and the like, historical performance and event data often gets overlooked.

By merging data from an artist’s past performances with that of a streaming and social data aggregator like Chartmetric, you might identify new opportunities or uncover unique insights about past campaigns.

Say one of your artists saw a significant uptick in streams in Detroit back in January 2023 but you’re not sure why. By filtering that artist’s past events in AG Workspace, you might find that the spike coincided with a certain in-studio performance and — what’s more — it had a outsized impact compared to similar events in other cities. From there, you could then develop and test a hypothesis about why that particular event yielded greater engagement with an artist’s music.

That’s just one example of how looking at data in new ways can yield powerful insights about prospective super fans.

It’s also essential that you continually evaluate data to refine your message and identify winning formulas. And AI can help. Due to its ability to identify patterns and other insights that us humans miss, AI tools like ChatGPT can be immensely valuable when it comes to analyzing your data. You’ll even find countless sample prompts to help you ask the right questions.

Just keep in mind that your organization may have rules regarding unvetted web tools. If in doubt, consult your organization’s policies.

Do more with Artist Growth Workspace

By implementing these 7 time-management tips, record label marketing and promotion teams can boost their efficiency, freeing up more time for creative and strategic tasks.

Try Workspace free to experience firsthand the difference an event and project management platform specially designed for the music industry makes for your organization.

‍

You’ve been asking, and today we’re thrilled to announce the latest way we’re streamlining artist event management. That’s right. Artist Growth Workspace is now integrated with Bandsintown for Artists!

The world's leading live music discovery platform, Bandsintown, helps more than 80 million fans discover shows by serving 4 billion personalized concert recommendations each year. If you haven't signed up for Bandsintown for Artists yet, join for free to claim your artist page, manage your events, and engage your Bandsintown followers.

This new functionality bridges the gap between Bandsintown and Workspace, enabling record labels, management teams, and individual artists to effortlessly import events directly from their Bandsintown for Artists account. Best of all? Automatic, real-time synchronization of your upcoming events. 

Let’s take a closer look at what Workspace’s Bandsintown integration means for you.

Automatically pull events with one-time setup

Our integration with Bandsintown is an ongoing, daily sync. 

This ensures that your Artist Growth calendar stays current with every new event added or updated in Bandsintown — without the need for manual updates. Maintaining visibility into your artists’ tours and performances has never been easier or more efficient.

Connect with multiple artists’ accounts

If you represent multiple artists, there’s a good chance that some of them have their performances loaded into Bandsintown.

Now, a single organization can link multiple artists’ individual Bandsintown accounts to their Artist Growth Workspace account. This flexibility ensures that each artist's unique event schedule is accurately reflected and managed within our platform.

Unlink without deleting already-imported events

We understand the need for control. Should you choose to unlink an artist’s Bandsintown account or their account is deleted, rest assured that your events in Artist Growth will remain intact. That also means that any data attached to past events will also remain safe.

Experience seamless artist event management

The integration of Bandsintown with Artist Growth Workspace marks another step forward in our commitment to providing innovative and user-friendly artist management solutions for the music industry.

Try Workspace free for 14 days to experience firsthand how our integration with Bandsintown can save you time importing and managing artist events.

Managing an unsigned artist can be a challenging yet immensely rewarding experience. As a manager, you have the opportunity to shape and guide the career of a talented musician, helping them achieve their dreams.

But managing an unsigned artist also comes with its own challenges. Without the backing of a record label, you (and your artist) will have to take on multiple roles and responsibilities to ensure their success.

However, don’t let that discourage you! As artists like Macklemore and Chance the Rapper have shown, there’s no limit to what an unsigned artist can achieve.

In this article, we'll discuss eight tips for how to manage an unsigned artist and help them navigate the music industry.

1. Establish clear goals and expectations

Before you begin managing an unsigned artist, it's crucial to establish clear goals and expectations for both yourself and the artist. This includes discussing their musical style, target audience, and long-term career goals.

It's also essential to have open and honest communication about the responsibilities and expectations of each party to help establish any necessary boundaries. As a manager, you may be responsible for booking gigs, promoting the artist, and handling finances, among other tasks. Conversely, make sure the artist understands their role in the partnership and is willing to put in the necessary work to achieve their goals.

2. Develop a strong online presence

A strong online presence is crucial for any artist, especially for those who are unsigned. As a manager, it's your responsibility to help the artist establish their personal brand and maintain a strong online presence.

This includes creating and managing social media accounts, consistently publishing new content, building a professional website, and promoting the artist's music on streaming platforms. It's also essential to regularly engage with fans and potential fans online to grow a loyal following.

To this aim, an artist management app like Artist Growth Workspace can help you keep track of and manage everything you and your artist are doing (more on that in a bit).

3. Network and build relationships

Networking is a crucial aspect of artist management. It's your responsibility to build relationships with industry professionals, such as publishers, record label executives, music producers, other artists and managers, and so on.

Attending industry events, conferences, and showcases is an excellent way to network and make connections. You can also use social media and online platforms to connect with industry professionals and promote your artist's music.

Networking isn’t just your responsibility, however, and while not every artist is the most outgoing, it’s important that you push them to also network as much as possible. 

4. Create a strategic marketing plan

Without the backing of a record label, it's essential to have a strategic marketing plan in place to promote your artist's music and grow their fan base. As a manager, you should work closely with the artist to develop a plan that aligns with their goals and budget, and is authentic to them.

This includes creating a press kit, reaching out to music bloggers and influencers, getting your artist’s songs on popular streaming playlists, planning releases, and utilizing social media and online advertising to promote their music. It's also crucial to regularly track and analyze the success of your marketing efforts to make necessary adjustments and improvements. Speaking of…

5. Collect and harness data

Beyond marketing data, you should be collecting all of the data you can for your artist. From weekly and monthly streams to album and merch sales to show attendance and social media engagement, if you can measure it, you should.

Not only will this data help you to make better decisions, like where to book shows or what merch to keep on-hand; in the event you do decide to pursue a record deal, labels are also going to want to see the data when evaluating your artist.

6. Keep a close eye on finances

Managing an unsigned artist also means managing their finances. As a manager, it's your responsibility to keep track of income and expenses, negotiate contracts, and ensure the artist is being paid fairly for their work.

It's essential to stay organized and keep detailed records of all financial transactions. This will not only help you manage the artist's finances effectively but also protect them from potential legal issues. And as mentioned previously, if getting signed is the goal, labels will most likely want to see aspects of your artist’s finances.

7. Lean on tools to stay organized and do more

Clearly, strong organizational skills are one of the most important traits of a successful artist manager. Fortunately, there are tools to make keeping track of it all easier — from basic spreadsheets and web-based calendars to dedicated artist management software.

Optimally, you want to choose a tool that enables you to track and manage everything from shows, promotional appearances, and social media posting to finances and historical data, while allowing you to share access with your artist and anyone else who is working with you to make their dreams a reality — like Workspace. 

You should also make sure that whatever tool you go with scales with your needs, should you wish to bring in additional team members or add artists to your roster.

Not sure what to look for in an artist management tool? Read our post, 10 Questions You Should Ask When Choosing Artist Management Software.

8. Be a support system

Artist management is about more than just managing the business side of art. In your role, it's crucial to be a support system for your artist and help them navigate the ups and downs of the music industry.

This means being a good listener, providing emotional support, and offering guidance and advice when needed. 

Laying the foundation for music success

Managing an unsigned artist requires a combination of hard work, dedication, and a strategic approach. 

By establishing clear goals and expectations, developing a strong online presence, networking and building relationships, creating a strategic marketing plan, staying organized, and providing emotional support, you can help your artist achieve success.

Try Artist Growth Workspace free for 14 days to see how an artist management app can help you keep organized and do more with the resources you have.

‍

As if we needed to tell you: Your time is super important. 

It’s a big part of why we created Artist Growth Workspace to begin with … that and to provide a single platform for storing and managing all of your artists’ activities, events, finances, and other essential data.

Which is why we’re pumped to announce our latest Workspace feature available to Rise, Scale, and Enterprise accounts: event schedule templates!

Event schedule templates mean more time for everything else 

Whether you’re managing promotions, booking a tour, or planning an album release, it’s pretty safe to say that scheduling is one of the most time-consuming and monotonous aspects of your job.

With event schedule templates, you can now create a schedule once and apply it across all your events. 

This means no more repetitive data entry so you can spend more time focusing on all of the other tasks on your plate. (Not to mention, using templates can help you avoid costly errors.)

Say you’re booking a tour. Sure, the venue and location will change. However, most tasks associated with the day to day won’t. Each has a load-in, soundcheck, set time, load-out, and so on. Instead of manually entering each schedule item, you can now build a template once, then apply it to each tour date, saving you hours or even days of work per artist. Plus, you can keep using that template for future tours.

Event schedule templates aren’t just for tours, though. Far from it. In fact, you can create as many templates for as many event types as you wish.

How to create event schedule templates in Workspace

Creating a template is easy. From your artist settings, click to add a template, then input your schedule items, give your template a name, and save. Simple.

Once created, applying a template to your events takes just a few clicks and can even be applied to already-created events. And editing, duplicating, and deleting templates is equally straightforward, giving you added flexibility and control.

Streamline artist event management with Workspace

Whatever your role in the music and entertainment industry, Workspace can help you do more with what you have by streamlining your organization's operations.

Sign up for a free 14-day trial or upgrade your Launch account to find out how event schedule templates and other great Workspace features can save you time, money, and more than a little frustration.

Whether you manage a single artist or a roster of talent, keeping track of it all is no easy feat. From juggling emails, texts, and phone calls to coordinating travel logistics, navigating disparate calendars, and managing big personalities, there’s a lot of chance for error.

Luckily, there are some great artist management tools out there to help you keep track of it all. You just have to know what to look for, as most project management tools aren’t geared for the music and entertainment space.

So to help you choose the best artist management software for your organization, we’re looking at 10 questions you should ask when evaluating your options. 

1. Can I see all of my artists’ events for the year in a single calendar view?

There’s nothing wrong with popular options like Google Calendar or Apple’s iCloud Calendar. For most people and businesses, they’re all you need. But in an industry where album release cycles can span 18–24 months and tours routinely extend into the next year, you need more.

Featuring both 6- and 12-month extended views, Artist Growth Workspace puts all of your events on a single screen. You can even view your calendar by location, allowing you to quickly see where an artist will be at any given time, which can be especially helpful in determining where to focus promotional efforts.

However, extended views aren’t the only requirement of an artist management calendar. Just as important is the day view.

Workspace, for example, lets you add day notes, travel and event information, and any associated files right alongside your schedule for the day, so that everything you might need to know is easily accessible from both your desktop and mobile device.

This also means you can easily recall historical event data that might be useful to an artist and their team when they return — like what media outlets and digital service providers were invited the last time they performed in that city.

2. Can I view my entire artist roster in one place?

If you manage more than one artist — or plan to — a roster-level calendar view is a must for many reasons.

Say you’re a label promotions team looking for opportunities to cross-promote artists or wondering where you should focus your marketing efforts. Or maybe you’re booking a joint tour with two artists.

In instances like these, you need to be able to see all of your artists’ events in a single calendar. At the same time, you need to be able to view each artist’s schedule individually.

Unfortunately, that’s not something you can do in many popular calendar and tour management apps, making this one of the most important questions to ask when vetting artist management software.

3. Can I control who can view and manage events, finances, and other sensitive information?

In music, as in other areas of the entertainment industry, a lot of planning goes on behind the scenes. The last thing you want is for someone to leak details of a yet-to-be-announced album release date or to find out how much an artist gets paid per show.

So how do you keep everyone involved appropriately informed without divulging more than necessary? By making certain that the artist management app you choose gives you complete control over user permissions. 

For example, Workspace's granular permission controls let you specify who in an artist’s team, label, or management agency can view and/or edit:

• Daysheets
• Finances
• Guest lists
• Performance dates
• Tentative events
• Travel logistics
• Ticket requests
• And much more

4. Can I access my data while offline?

For an industry that’s always on the move, it’s absolutely essential that you’re able to access schedules, travel logistics, and other data even when you’re offline.

Most management software, however, doesn’t work that way. 

With the Workspace mobile app, though, you can view your information, and even make changes, while offline. That way you can keep working, knowing that any changes you make while offline will sync later.

5. Can I export day sheets, itineraries, and tour books?

Knowing you can access your artist management software anytime, anywhere is a beautiful thing. Still, some team members will prefer or need to have something printed out.

With most calendars and conventional project management tools, you’re on your own to create things like printed agendas and itineraries. That’s a problem for two reasons: 1) It eats into your already-limited time, and 2) it introduces the potential for errors that could derail your tightly coordinated plans.

Before you make a decision on artist management software, make sure that it enables you to export day sheets, tour books, and other itineraries for easy printing and sharing.

6. Can I track and export expenses and revenues?

No artist project management tool would be complete without the ability to track and manage finances. But while many tools have templates for budgeting, there are often limitations that you should take into consideration.

For example, can you upload receipts? Link financial transactions to specific events? Or export to popular tax and accounting software?

Workspace lets you sort financial transactions, upload receipts and, critically, link transactions to specific events, giving you a holistic view of your operation’s finances.

Additionally, you can export your finances as CSV files for uploading to tax and accounting software — with third-party integrations on the way.

7. Can I manage and approve guest pass requests and ticket budgets? 

For record labels, the process of requesting, managing, and approving guest passes and tickets for performances and promotional events can be a major source of inefficiency. Often, requests are submitted informally via email, text, or DM, and managed via spreadsheets.

Well-thought artist management software, however, can streamline your ticket request workflow and budgeting process.

Workspace users can easily request guest passes and tickets. Meanwhile, approvers can quickly approve or deny requests thanks to customizable notification settings. 

Additionally, ticket managers can allocate tickets to people and groups within your organization, who can then share those tickets with promoters, members of the media, and so on. Depending on your Workspace tier, users can even aggregate and segment requests and ticket budgets by tour, group, or department.

8. Can I import events from Bandsintown, Songkick, WME, and others?

If your artists’ tour dates and other events are already listed on a website like Bandsintown or Songkick, why should you have to go through the painstaking process of entering each and every one into your artist management platform?

The answer: You shouldn’t. Thanks to our integrations with Bandsintown for Artists and Songkick, pulling in your artist’s events is as simple as entering a URL. Scale and Enterprise Workspace users can also pull in data via our integration with WME.

Before choosing a tool, make sure that integrations like these are on the roadmap, if not already available.

Read more: New Feature: Bandsintown Integration for Streamlined Artist Event Management

9. Can I manage and view events across time zones?

Another area where many calendar apps fail the music industry is when it comes to managing time zones.

To be fair, for most professionals, if you have a call at 3 pm, ET, but traveled to California for work, then you’ll need to jump on Zoom at noon local time (PT) — so your calendar adjusting to local time makes sense. But in our industry, there are a lot of instances in which you would not want this to happen.

Take show times. While the member of your team or record label charged with entering details about an artist’s performances may be in New York, chances are the show is going to be at 8 pm local time regardless.

Any artist management app worth its weight will give you the option to view and enter events by either your location or that of an event. And it should be easy to toggle between the two. If the tool you’re looking at doesn’t, that should be a red flag that it may not meet the needs of the music industry.

Workspace's savvy time zone management eliminates the confusion of cross-country and global scheduling. For record labels managing international artists, this means performance, promotion, and release schedules align perfectly with the artists’ event times, irrespective of location.

10. Can I store files, guarantees, and other important deal info?

Finally, no artist management tool would be complete without a way to save files and information like setlists, contracts, and guarantees directly to events. That way, nothing gets lost.

This also means you can easily find information from the last time an artist performed at a certain venue or location.

Workspace puts everything you need to know about an event right on your calendar — from event, marketing, and promotion notes to guest lists to contact information and much more. You can even pull up directions right from the event.

Try Artist Growth’s Workspace artist management software for free

Hopefully these 10 questions are helpful to you as you evaluate which artist management tool is right for you and your team.

Choosing the best artist management software for you is a major decision, which is why we offer a free trial of Artist Growth Workspace. Because ultimately, what’s important is that the tool you choose makes your job (and those of your team) easier — and the best way to find out is to try it yourself.

Sign up for your free 14-day trial and find out if Workspace is right for you.

‍

Updated January 31, 2024