Let's see some of the software and apps that can support us in managing our music related activities:
WhatsApp Group Chats work as a breeding ground for new ideas, quick rehearsal organization and just overall band communication. You can set up groups in various categories, for example album songwriting, live communication, music production etc. You can also collect live-pictures and videos, using WhatsApp as a sort of mobile archive, forwarding your audio-visual fragments to other platforms and working from there.
Be sure to set up your data-service properly and according to your plan, especially when sending song-moods and large videos.
Benefits: Feasible, easy to use, free.
Benefits for Music Industries: Help to create more networks.
Musician: You can put photo and video, audio, stories to share. Share documents. Create specific groups and call meetings.
Google Spreadsheet: Planning tours, finance or production details, you should think about opening the process to various band members, instead of just editing sheets by yourself on various files on your hard drive. You can achieve a great level of transparency by inviting your fellow musicians to overview current information concerning live- or production planning. A great way of using spreadsheets is also sharing documents with certain trusted people you work with. Let your booker have access to your live sheet and set up a joint coordination of live activity.
Benefits for Industries: Open a production-sheet with your producers or songwriters and actively visualize where more works needs to get done, which projects are finished or in the final stages.
Benefits: spreadsheets are a great way of sharing information with financial advisors or active participants in your budgeting process.
Todoist
Todoist is a free tool for staying on top of things. Don’t fall into the musicians cliche of getting lost in sonic endeavors. Don’t neglect the day-to-day stuff like presswork or plain deadlines. Use this tool to set up neatly organized to-do events and make it a daily habit of checking them.
At the end of a month, you’ll be sure to get a real kick out of realizing the amount of stuff you were able to get done, feeling good about the process while having a clear image of tasks you were able to work out.
Benefits to the musicians: share your Todoist with certain band members or set up shared lists to get larger projects done. Especially when working in hot phases of various creative processes, this tool can act as a helping hand, giving you more headspace for the creative process.
Slack
Slack is powerful real-time messaging service, used massively within the start-up scene. As band you can profit from the extensive archiving and search-functions, it also has a great integration with other services such as Dropbox.
Benefits to the musicians: can use it to stay in close contact to your external team. Sorting the people, you work with into different groups can help. Save time while staying organized and on top of things.
Agile Methodology
It’s a process for managing a project that involves constant collaboration and working in iterations. Today, the word Agile can refer to these values and the frameworks for implementing them, including Scrum, Kanban, Extreme Programming (XP), and Adaptive Project Framework (APF).
Benefits:
Agile Tools
TRELLO
Trello is a free web-service for organising stuff. One of its common applications is using it as a Kanban board (agile methodologies), with cards moving across that represents a task in a production process. This concept allows you to get a big picture and see each individual task simultaneously in a nice visual way, something that a typical to-do list fails to achieve. It is commonly used for software and web development, marketing, customer support, and other teams and businesses.
JIRA
