Designing a collaborative infrastructure for emerging live music

The music industry is undergoing structural changes.

Festival culture dominates the scene, small venues are closing or reducing activity, audiences are fragmented across micro-genres and emerging artists operate without institutional or financial support.

While large-scale events thrive, the grassroots live circuit weakens.

For emerging musicians, performing live often means economic uncertainty, administrative complexity and paying upfront costs without revenue guarantees.

Live music becomes a financial risk rather than an opportunity.

Problem Framing

Through desk research and qualitative interviews, one idea appeared consistently.

Emerging artists feel forced to assume financial risk to perform live. They struggle with finding other bands to share costs, aligning schedules and logistics, negotiating venue conditions, managing payments and assessing potential concert viability.

Organizing a concert is fragmented, manual and multi-channel.

Journey Mapping

We mapped the full journey: The highest frustration points appeared when artists had to coordinate with other bands, align dates and share venue costs without clarity or guarantees.

The design direction was clear: reduce uncertainty, increase transparency and centralize coordination.

The core of the experience revolves around three fundamental flows: Concert organization, Gig discovery and Joining a concert as co-performer.

Before defining the visual layer, we needed to define how Backstage should be perceived.

We conducted a series of workshops to define the mission, values and target audience of Backstage. The goal was to align on what the product stands for, who it serves and the role it plays within the local music ecosystem.

We established a set of brand principles, personality attributes and archetypes that acted as a north star for every visual design decision. We defined how Backstage should feel.

The UI was designed to visually communicate clarity and structure while staying fully aligned with the brand principles defined during the workshops.

We defined a modular layout system and a set of design tokens to establish the foundations of typography, color palette, spacing, grids and components.

The system was built to ensure visual and interaction consistency throughout the entire process and across all team members involved in the project.