About the Interviewee
Steven is the founder of Soundcheck, an operations platform purpose-built for the live events industry. Where most people see the stage, Steven sees the sprawling, fragmented, spreadsheet-driven infrastructure that makes every performance possible. Soundcheck was founded on the conviction that bands, promoters, venues, caterers, and finance teams should not have to speak five different languages and juggle five different tools just to put on a show. By centralizing back-of-house operations—scheduling, payments, logistics, set files, and member management—Soundcheck gives performers what they actually came for: the freedom to simply perform. The platform is AI-first by design, built to surface the right information to the right person in the right language, without requiring everyone involved to learn a new vocabulary.
Executive Summary
The live events industry is one of the most resilient and misunderstood sectors in the modern economy. While headlines have tracked wave after wave of technology industry layoffs, live events have quietly kept growing—with clients hiring more, not less, and demand for live performance showing no signs of slowing. Yet behind every concert, festival, and corporate gig lies an operational reality that has barely changed in decades: a tangle of spreadsheets, disconnected tools, and informal agreements that leave performers financially exposed and operators perpetually overwhelmed.
Soundcheck was built to change that. This paper draws on a conversation with Steven, Soundcheck’s founder, to explore the problem the platform is solving, how it differentiates itself in a fragmented market, what it has learned about growing in an industry that runs on relationships and gut instinct, and what the future looks like for a sector finally ready to be understood on its own terms.
The Problem No One Talks About
A Language Problem Disguised as a Technology Problem
The live events industry does not lack for tools. It lacks for a shared language. An event is not called an event by everyone involved in it. For a project manager, it is an event. For a performer, it is a gig. For a caterer, it is an order. For the security team working the door, it is a shift. For the finance department cutting the checks, it is an invoice.
Each of those labels corresponds to a different software category, a different workflow, and a different frame of reference. Multiply that across a moderately sized touring operation—band members, a booking agent, a venue coordinator, a stage manager, a catering partner, and a payroll contact—and you begin to understand why the industry has historically defaulted to spreadsheets. At least a spreadsheet does not care what you call the thing in column A.
“The issue with live events is there are too many people involved that speak different languages. An event is an event for a project manager, it’s a gig for a performer, it’s an order for a caterer, it’s a shift for the security person, and it’s an invoice for finance. They all speak different languages—and each language is a different tool.”
The consequence of this fragmentation is not just operational inefficiency. It is a structural power imbalance. When the people who manage the data—agents, promoters, management companies—hold all the information, performers are left guessing about their own earnings, their own schedules, and their own standard terms. There is no industry standard to appeal to. There is no data to reference. There is only the word of whoever controls the spreadsheet.
The Performer’s Blind Spot
Most performers did not get into music to become financial analysts. They came to perform. And the industry has, for a long time, taken advantage of that gap between passion and financial literacy. Performers get exploited left and right because they do not have data—and the people they work with do. The result is a system that extracts significant fees from artists for basic administrative tasks that, with the right infrastructure, should be nearly automated.
Soundcheck’s founding premise is simple: give the performer their data back. Show them what they are making month over month. Let them see their schedule, their set files, their logistics, their payment history—all in one place, without requiring them to chase down three different people for a straight answer. The band gets the app. They get booked through the app. They perform. Everything else is handled.
What Soundcheck Actually Does
Operations Platform, Not Another Collaboration Tool
Soundcheck is frequently asked how it compares to other music collaboration or audio tools. The answer is that it does not, really—because it is solving a fundamentally different problem. Audio collaboration tools help musicians make music together. Soundcheck helps the live events ecosystem function. It is the back of house: the part of the operation that the audience never sees, and that performers rarely want to think about, but that determines whether any of the front-of-house magic is sustainable.
The platform handles member management for bands and ensembles, payroll and payment tracking, scheduling and logistics, set files and document management, and the connective tissue between all of those workflows that currently lives in someone’s inbox or someone’s private spreadsheet. The goal is to make the invisible infrastructure of a live performance visible, organized, and accessible to everyone who needs it—in the format that actually makes sense for their role.
AI-First by Design
Soundcheck is deliberately an AI-first platform, and Steven is specific about what that means in practice. It does not mean AI features bolted onto existing workflows as a selling point. It means the platform is architected around the insight that the same back-end data can and should surface differently depending on who is looking at it.
A finance contact does not need to see gig terminology. They need to see numbers: invoices, payments, outstanding balances, month-over-month trends. A performer does not need to see contract line items on a dashboard designed for accountants. They need to see the venue, the load-in time, the gate code, the set list, and what they are getting paid. A venue coordinator needs something else entirely. AI makes it possible to build curated, role-specific interfaces on top of a single shared data model—without having to build and maintain five entirely separate products.
“Our backend is the same. We don’t need to replicate that. But with AI, we can showcase curated interfaces for everybody involved. If I’m in finance, I don’t see any gig terminology—I just see the numbers. If I’m a performer, I see the location, my set list, the gate code. Everything related to being a performer.”
This architecture also positions Soundcheck well for the long-term challenge of language and localization. Finance, as Steven notes, speaks the same language in every country. The terminological and cultural specificity that makes live events so fragmented in English is not the hard part—it is the layer above a universal data structure that AI can increasingly navigate, translate, and curate.
Building in an Industry Managed on Spreadsheets
The Fundraising Challenge
The live events industry is, in Steven’s framing, a misunderstood field. Its resilience is remarkable—it kept growing when the broader tech sector was contracting sharply—but it has historically been opaque to the kinds of investors who fund software companies. Why? Because it has been managed on spreadsheets. When an industry’s operational data lives in private Excel files and informal WhatsApp threads, there is no data trail for investors to analyze, no benchmarks to point to, no comparables to frame the opportunity.
Soundcheck is currently raising, and Steven identifies investor education as the primary challenge. Not product-market fit—the platform resonates clearly with the operators and performers it serves. The challenge is convincing investors who have never had to think about how a gig gets paid out that this is a category worth backing.
What the Industry Looks Like From the Inside
One of the more important things Soundcheck has learned—and one of the things that shapes how it builds—is that the people who run live events are not waiting to be disrupted. They are solving real, specific, often exhausting problems with the tools they have. The job of a new platform is not to tell them their workflows are wrong. It is to listen long enough to understand what is actually broken, and then build something that makes the right thing easier.
“The biggest lesson is: don’t assume anything. Just listen to your customers and go from there. They have so much knowledge, and they have problems that need to be solved. A lot of times you don’t know what the problems are and you’re guessing.”
The practical application of that principle at Soundcheck has been to approach early customer conversations less like sales calls and more like discovery sessions. Steven describes it with some humor as becoming therapists on the first couple of calls—asking about problems, listening to frustrations, taking notes. Those notes become product specs. Those product specs become prototypes built rapidly with AI tooling. Those prototypes go back to the customer before a contract is even signed, turning the sales process itself into a demonstration of what a more organized operation could look like.
Team and Talent
On the question of team-building, Steven’s priority is not headcount—it is agency. The live events space requires people who can operate with a high degree of autonomy in a new and somewhat undefined industry context. Soundcheck is not looking for talent the way a scaled company would be. It is looking for the specific kind of person who is drawn to the mission of bringing structure to an industry that has resisted it, and who can move quickly enough to make that mission real.
The challenge is less about attracting people than about paying the people already on the team. The mission resonates. The compensation is the constraint that fundraising is meant to solve.
What Comes Next for Live Events Operations
Standardization as the Long-Term Prize
The live events industry has no standard. There is no shared baseline for what a performer should be paid for a given type of engagement, no common framework for how contracts are structured, no industry-wide system for tracking what has and has not been delivered. That absence of standardization is the condition that allows exploitation to persist—and it is also, from a software perspective, an enormous opportunity.
Soundcheck’s long-term position is not just to be the platform that a specific band or venue uses to manage their operations. It is to be the platform through which the industry’s norms get established, documented, and enforced. When enough of the industry is running its back-of-house through a single system, the data that system generates becomes the baseline. What is a standard rate? What does a standard contract look like? What does month-over-month revenue growth look like for a band at this stage in their career? These are currently unanswerable questions. Soundcheck is building the infrastructure to answer them.
AI and the Curated Experience
The roadmap for Soundcheck’s AI capabilities points toward increasingly personalized and proactive interfaces. Today, AI helps Soundcheck show different users different views of the same data. Tomorrow, it will surface the right information at the right moment—flagging an unusual payment delay before the performer notices, suggesting contract terms based on comparable engagements, alerting a venue coordinator when a scheduling conflict is about to become a problem.
The eventual expansion into multilingual support follows the same logic. The platform’s data model is language-agnostic. As AI gets better at navigating industry-specific terminology in different languages, Soundcheck’s reach extends without requiring the platform to be rebuilt from scratch for each new market. The goal is a back-of-house platform that feels genuinely local to every user, regardless of where they are operating.
A More Empowered Performer
Perhaps the most meaningful long-term outcome Soundcheck is building toward is not operational efficiency—it is performer empowerment. The live events industry has historically concentrated data and leverage in the hands of intermediaries. Platforms like Soundcheck shift that balance by giving performers access to their own information: what they have earned, what they have agreed to, what the trends in their career look like, and what they should expect from the people they work with.
A performer who has data is a performer who can negotiate. Who can identify when something is off. Who can make decisions about their career based on evidence rather than instinct or trust. That shift does not require dismantling the existing industry infrastructure—it just requires making the information that already exists accessible to the people it concerns most.
About Soundcheck
Soundcheck is an AI-first operations platform for the live events industry. The platform handles the back-of-house infrastructure that makes live performances possible: band and member management, scheduling, logistics, payroll, document management, and the connective tissue between all of those workflows. Built with a curated, role-specific interface for every stakeholder—performers, finance teams, venue coordinators, booking agents, and beyond—Soundcheck gives everyone involved in a live event the information they actually need, in the language they actually use, without requiring them to adopt a new vocabulary or manage a new spreadsheet.
Soundcheck is currently raising its first institutional round. The company is headquartered in the United States and serves clients across the live events ecosystem.
About StartupSword.com
StartupSword.com is an editorial platform publishing candid, experience-first conversations with the founders, operators, and builders shaping the next generation of business and culture. This white paper is part of the Entrepreneurship & Innovation Series, which profiles practitioners with a track record of doing the work—not just talking about it.