7 useful productivity tools for independent musicians

For those artists looking for new ways to boost their productivity (and aren’t we all?), these seven tools can help you manage your money, create better habits, and generally accomplish more.

Guest post by Randi Zimmerman of the Symphonic Blog

Looking for new resources to boost your productivity? Manage your finances, form better habits, and get shit done with these useful productivity tools. Here are some of our favorites for independent musicians…

“Music changes, and I’m gonna change right along with it.” -Aretha Franklin

Band Mule

Band Mule is an easy-to-use private band organizer and band calendar. With it, you can plan gigs, manage your set lists, share files, chat, and share songs. It’s like having a mini manager in your pocket.

Lifeline

Lifeline is a great app developed by the smart people over at Saent. It works by ensuring you take sufficient breaks and better manage your time so you can experience productive, healthy, and fulfilling days. It mainly functions like an innovative timer app, providing flexible session lengths, perfectly timed breaks, and a real-time progress bar to help you develop an optimal daily working rhythm.

If you’re looking to better manage your time and maintain a healthier workflow, this app will change your life.

Mint

Mint is a budgeting app that can help you keep track of your spending and balances. Mint suggests how you could be saving money based on your financial information and transactions. As an independent artist, you’re in charge of how you decide to spend your money. From investing in your team to spending money on Spotify ads, it’s important to keep track of your spending no matter how big or small. — This app can help you do that.

(To learn more about managing your money as an artist, check out “Money Management Tips for Independent Musicians”.)

Fluence

Fluence is a platform that lets you connect with influential people in the industry without having to build up years of contacts. According to their site, you can get feedback from the pro’s, including A&Rs, bloggers, company managers, industry professional, label manager etc., all in one place.

Kompoz

Kompoz is the perfect tool for remote collaboration. With Kompoz, you can use your favorite audio editing software, like Pro Tools, GarageBand, Logic Pro X, PreSonus StudioOne, REAPER, etc. Just upload your song idea to Kompoz, invite others to jump in and you might get a drummer in France, a keyboard player in Nashville, or a bass player in Malaysia.

It’s super easy to use, and you can create public collaborations to work with artists from their worldwide community or collab privately with your friends and bandmates. It’s up to you.

Streaks

Streaks is basically a to-do list that holds you accountable, every single day. With it, you can choose up to 12 habits per day that you’d like to implement into your daily life and track their progress. Want to spend more time learning music theory? Add it to the list. Want to make more beats every day? No problem. You can add that, too.

Working on something every day is the first step to forming a long-term habit. Every day that you complete on Streaks adds up, and if you forget a day, your score goes back to zero.

HelloSign

This website offers free online contract signing. For those who do a lot of remote collaboration, this is a godsend. Let’s say your vocalist lives in Los Angeles, your producer is in Atlanta, and you live in New York… Sure, you could mail everything back and forth or meet up somewhere in-between, but HelloSign lets you electronically request and add legally binding signatures to any document. From licensing agreements and split sheets to cowriting agreements and more, you can sign all these with HelloSign.

D.I.Y.