A music streaming platform that reaches upwards of 283 million people a month, Boiler Room strives to bring a unique and valuable experience to artists and fans alike.
More music, less noise
“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.
Boiler Room uses 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.
“Airtable allows us to do more without tearing our hair out. 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 put everything into making these events impactful.”
Larry Gale
Head of Live Production
Workflow highlights
“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.”
“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.
Gale’s 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.
In the past, Boiler Room 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.