Beatswitch
Worlds Leading Music Event And Festival Management Software

The onset of the coronavirus pandemic put a sudden halt to everyday life and business, with music festivals and various cultural activities facing the brunt of the health crisis. With lockdown restrictions in place, bans on mass gathering and social distancing measures meant that the 2020 festival season was literally wiped out, causing a 90.2 per cent drop in revenue for festivals in 2020, with potentially 50 per cent redundancies in the workforce. Its impact on music festivals has resulted in many cancellations of significant events and artists turning their homes into a stage for performances such as live sessions and virtual events. Furthermore, there has been prominent use of social media as a platform to connect with fans and festival goers and keep them engaged. Today, with vaccination programmes in full swing across the globe, the prospects of holding festivals in 2021 witnessed a glimmer of hope for revival. At the Circus nightclub and the Sefton Park Pilot music festival in early May, crowds totalling over 13,000 people were in high spirits at the two pilot events in Liverpool. These were part of an event research programme by the government of the U.K, offering audiences a taste of the old norm and pre-covid style festival with no social distancing or face coverings as an experiment on the spread of the coronavirus in mass events. However, social distancing, capacity limits, compulsory negative certificates and restrictions under the tiered systems all mean that it is still an immense challenge to hold events in a safe and economically viable way.

That said, the certainty of hosting music festivals still remains unclear, and with no-definitive play-book, one thing is for sure that communication between organisers, book agencies and artists will be more crucial than ever before. One company, Beatswitch, focuses on connecting festival organisers and booking agencies to empower the artist. The company offers a single business platform to plan, collaborate and work on music events efficiently by tracking changes in the planning and providing the right information to the right person with the correct view. “It is an event planning tool that becomes intelligent during the festival as a digital assistant and makes planning more dynamic with suggestions on what action to take when the planning is changing,” - Gertjan De Wilde, Co-founder of Beatswitch.

Gain Control over the Whole Artist Management Workflow

Beatswitch provides users with a fully automated advancing workflow to ensure that all artist related data is available in the crucial moments they need it. With its intuitive timetable builder functionality, it serves as a perfect tool for talent buyers and artist managers to drag and drop data from concept to a fully confirmed lineup of the event. “Beatswitch is designed to centralise everything into one place and create a working environment to collaborate better with all necessary tools for every role in your festival management team in place,” - Gertjan De Wilde. In addition, the company’s production website enables users the ability to define an advancing timeline with specific milestones to simplify the advancing process.

The Beatswitch platform offers a dedicated tasks overview and mobile notifications to keep everybody in sync. Its centralised file management enables the team to access information from one single place. However, just like on the festival site, not everyone needs to have access to everything.

Beatswitch Is Designed To Centralise Everything Into One Place And Create A Working Environment To Collaborate Better With All Necessary Tools For Every Role In Your Festival Management Team In Place

Beatswitch helps create specific user roles for temporary team members and freelancers to give them only access to the data and dashboards they need and keep them away from information that is redundant to them. “Users can assign and manage a standard set of data permissions to certain members in their team, which is an efficient way to boost productivity by keeping everyone focused solely on their tasks,” - Gertjan De Wilde.

The Digital Event Production Office

Beatswitch's production website is the beating heart of a user's festival production. They can use it to streamline their artists' workflow by advancing back and forth and retrieve all applications and other essential data from crews, volunteers, vendors, partners and more in a structured manner. The platform's intelligent CRM system allows users to quickly create different profiles for all their contacts, such as artists, agents, crews, partners with their specific data and information. The data will be stored and retrieved in Beatswitch's cloud-based solution that provides festival teams with a centralised, secured in a structured way. Furthermore, users can export data from the cloud for easy reporting and generate comprehensive reports for guest lists, accommodation, artist hospitality, using actionable and up-to-date info to share with the crew. Event managers can keep track of costs, transports, and more, with clear and visualised actionable data from reports specially built for festival teams. They can also monitor all efforts from their team by using the platform's activity log to optimise the collaboration and boost productivity.

The Beatswitch 2.0

Recently, Beatswitch launched a beta version of their new interface, as the company started updating its branding about a year ago. “We loved our old interface that lasted four years and many of our clients felt at home logging into Beatswitch but we felt it was time for a change,” - Gertjan De Wilde. Firstly, Beatswitch had a fair amount of legacy code in it’s software which caused some pages to visually appear very different from our newer ones, with inconsistency and confusion amongst the users as a result. So the company finally decided to make its visual identity future-proof and consistent across the Beatswitch platform. Beatswitch intended to use the input from its users to improve its solution. However, the forms on these views were very complex and are a real challenge to implement in a user-friendly way. With consistency as a crucial keyword, the company needed to redesign and improve its platform by offering the same level of user experience across all the interface components.

In addition, it became clear that besides a new look with a strong focus on UX, Beatswitch’s platform also needed a more systematic way to keep up with the demand for new functionalities by its clients and general maintenance. To achieve this, the company decided to revamp its system by aligning the foundations of its design language, streamlining user experience processes for a scalable and repeatable UI language that offered faster and consistent product development. “We feel like it’s a huge leap forward and sincerely hope it brings more .