Booking Bands with Airtable

When we did our big expansion at the arcade back in 2023 one of the things I wanted to do with the additional space was have a flex area that could be used for regular seating most of the time but double as an area for live music on Friday nights. We had DJ nights before with different themes and karaoke and stuff like that but it was always very tight and a full band never would have worked.

Since then over the past year and a half with the help of friend Seth Casana at Big Wig Productions we've hit a stride with booking music acts for the arcade. And the way Seth handles the process using Airtable has been pretty interesting and unique so I figured it was worth a writeup. It actually starts with another piece of online software, Fillout, which is a slick web app for building online forms that has features that remind me a lot of the power of Gravity Forms. It's used as the entry point for any band wishing to perform at Reclaim Arcade for the first time and gives Seth some basic information like contact info, genre/style, equipment setup needs, etc. The free version we're using has a bunch of stuff but you can also pay for whitelabeling, custom CSS, premium question types, and other types of stuff.

That form feeds a database with its own table view that has additional fields for potential dates/times, contracts, artwork for the event, and other details. There's also a status field to know where a particular stands: whether it's still open, in negotiation, or booked. While Seth has full editing privileges I only see a view that he's able to provide me that is a password-protected page of all upcoming events at Reclaim.

I'm able to use this view not only to check on the status and see what has been booked but also to grab artwork that he has gotten and setup Facebook events, get social media profile URLs to tag the artists with, all kinds of information.

One key feature of Airtable used pretty heavily with this setup as well is automations. You want an email when a status change? No problem. You want a feedback form you made in Fillout to be sent when the date is X days past the event date field? Easy. You start to quickly realize the more you play with it how you could really use it as a very common sense approach for the tech-minded but non-programmer type to build their own web application style routines.

I know there are other steps to Seth's process that are not currently automated but that he plans to roll into this setup. Right now the contract creation process is manual and we use Docusign to get it done but there are integrations to make that part seamless (and no reason all the data in the contract can't be fed from fields in the database). He bills me with Quickbooks but Fillout even has a Stripe integration that can be used for payments.

In fact because of how great this experience has been when we had a need to build out a better workflow for private events at Reclaim I reached back out to Seth and asked if he'd use what he created as a model to help us. It's still a work in progress but we've already been able to use pieces of it to successfully get leads, schedule out private off hours parties, and bill them for those bookings. What's wild is I know we're only scratching the surface of what Airtable can do and it's a fairly inexpensive tool if you don't need enterprise level features.

It's been awesome to see not only live music start to find a footing at Reclaim Arcade and thrive (Check out our event calendar for upcoming stuff) but also to get a great project management workflow for handling the whole process and see how easily these tools can make it look seamless. Kudos to Seth for having the idea and building it out for his business so that we could benefit!