More music, less noise: how Boiler Room reaches music fans worldwide
“Boiler Room is different things to different people,” Larry Gale, Head of Live Production says. For fans, Boiler Room provides a music discovery platform. Gale says, “we’re keen to offer artists the best place that their music can be discovered. Not necessarily the biggest music platform, but the most important for Underground Music.”
The small London-based team is well on their way to meeting these goals, having organized events in over 150 countries and streaming up to 30 live shows every month. “Our main goal is to shine a light on underground and undiscovered music acts across the world,” Jess Morton, Head of Marketing and Social at Boiler Room explains. From footage of South Korea's Park Hye Jin DJing in Paris to Russia's Mujuice performing in Moscow, Boiler Room offers a virtual front row seat to sets around the world.
Working across platforms
Along with livestream events that are released on platforms such as YouTube, Periscope, and VK, Boiler Room also puts out shortform content across their social platforms.
“We have up to seven social channels running at a time,” Gale explains. “The best selects from the event make it into small clips published on our social media platforms. Each stage of this is tracked through Airtable.”
In the past, they used a combination of spreadsheets and docs. “We felt like we weren't linked up and everyone was working in silos,” Morton explains. “If you are using a multitude of tools or a multitude of different information-gathering tools, things go missing quite quickly. Or, if everyone is working from different sources, they have different information and aren't always aligned,” Gale says. This matters for reasons beyond organizational efficiency. “If information goes missing, we can have serious consequences affecting anything from brand integrity to people's safety.”
Inside their process
Boiler Room use Airtable to organize everything from the budget and logistics of their shows to their marketing and social media output. “We can track the process of an event through every stage of production, from inception to completion,” Gale shares.
“Typically with livestream content, the idea will start with the music team, who have to put together a budget. When the budget gets approved, we'll generate a unique code called a 'project code',” Gale explains. All this information is submitted via an Airtable form, which then notifies Gale and the project management team.
Using various filtered views, each team can curate which information they see, safe in the knowledge that everyone is working from the same underlying dataset. “A single record can be different things to different people,” Gale says. “My team in live production can just see the staffing, the venue information, the project code, whereas the marketing team can take the same record, and fill in information pertaining to the performance of that event, so that when it comes to reporting back, we have the key metrics we need.”
"Airtable allows us to do more without tearing our hair out."
His team relies on the Kanban view for an easy visualization of what’s on the agenda. “It's something I really like in modern project management,” Gale tells us. For the marketing team, the calendar view is integral to content planning.
“Airtable allows us to do more without tearing our hair out," Gale admits. "We’re a small team covering multiple disciplines, so the more we can simplify our workflow, and stay organized, the better. It means that we can keep our focus where it needs to be, and put everything into making these events impactful."