A messy creative process
With the team distributed between Australia and the U.S., Future Classic has always understood long-distance relationships. Even before we opened shop in LA, we needed to find ways to work together from different locations. The intrinsically collaborative nature of our artists’ writing process meant we needed a solution for file sharing.
Many of our artists make music in the electronic space, which is particularly well-suited to collaboration. A producer might make a beat in one part of the world, send it to a vocalist in another country, and then to a mix engineer somewhere else. Our generation of producers grew up producing beat files on Ableton and Pro Tools software, and for our earliest artists, like Flume or Ta-ku, bouncing a song around the globe is second nature.
The creative process can quickly get messy. But don’t settle for collaboration solutions that get in your way.
The creative process varies widely. The way an artist works is quite different from the way a mix engineer works, from how a music video director works, and from how our ingestion and production team works.
We used an online server and backed up onto hard drives, but everyone in our office had their own system of organizing and sharing files on various platforms. It was all over the place, time consuming, and far from secure.
Dropbox was a natural solution for us because it becomes a logical workflow for how our artists already work. We’ve always followed what our artists do, and at the time it seemed everyone already had their own personal Dropbox—I’d also used Dropbox in the past for personal use—so we gravitated toward that.
When it came to our files, we used a few other platforms for bits and pieces: Google Drive for budgets and spreadsheets, and sometimes WeTransfer to send files. But it seemed important that we go with a platform with accessible uniformity, that could be deployed and used top to bottom, from our founders to the brand-new intern. As our company grew, we needed a system that could also grow alongside us.