Touring Machine
Touring Machine is like the Basecamp of world touring. It’s a place where all the information surrounding a tour – venue addresses, travel iteneraries, crew contacts, load times, contracts, maps – is made accessible to the whole crew.
Design and development
Result
Touring Machine is used all over the world by managers for established acts like Duke Dumont, Rudimental and The Overtones (pictured)
Website
We don't really see it when we get dazzled at a concert, but the music touring industry is notorious for ad-hoc and inefficient methods of organising work and communications. Tour managers cobble together communications across email, cloud documents, paper contracts, WhatsApp, hand-scribbled itineraries, Post-it notes… and information is lost in the process.
The touring industry is full of technically incompetent luddites. Cruncher helped me realise a dream and made communication with my colleagues incredibly simple. They rock.
Sound engineer Anna Dahlin (TPI's front-of-house Engineer of the Year 2024), is on a mission to sort out the mess. Tired of the crossed wires and missed opportunities, she came to Cruncher shouting, "help!". She began by giving us a crash course on the daily realities of being a tour manager as we looked increasingly aghast at the details.
Development
With Anna's help we first defined a Minimum Viable Product, a base set of functionalities that will actually be helpful to a tour amanager, and, armed with this set of features, we drew up wireframes then set to work modelling the problem.
Touring Machine, with its simplified but granular permissions system, enables tour managers, band managers, performers and crew members are each able to read and edit the information that concerns them. Concert and travel dates sync with their calendars, updated schedules are alerted via email, and contacts for a whole tour are all stored together, reducing the amount of work required to manage a tour.
The app is backed by a REST API served by Django. The interface is entirely responsive, as it needs to be just as useable on the road as from behind a desk. It is designed around a visual 'pages' metaphor that clearly communicates the information hierarchy: a list of tours on the top level page; tours contain events; events contain addresses, maps and itineraries.
The final result
Touring Machine puts all the useful tour information in one place: dates, addresses, itineraries, access plans, contracts, etc. A simple permissions system with a fine granularity, enables each crew member to consult information relevant to themsleves, whether they be a Tour Manager, Band Manager, Artist, Crew Member and so on. Tour dates are synchronised to user's calendars, with changes to dates and times are notified by email.
With everything in one place, organising a tour has never been so easy.
