What We Built in September 2026: 3D Stage Plots, Eleven Flyer Designs & a GIGXCHANGE App That Reads Like a MagazineThe month the tools stopped being forms: a stage you can turn in three dimensions, setlists and tour dates that publish as live pages, eleven flyer designs plus one you build yourself, and an app laid out like a magazine

If August was the month the front door got wider, September was the month the workshop behind it got serious. I spent most of it on the five things an artist actually hands to a venue: the stage plot, the setlist, the tour dates, the press kit and the flyer. All five existed in some form. None of them, honestly, were good enough to send to a booker without apologising for them first.

So they were rebuilt as things you publish rather than things you fill in. A stage plot is now a room you can turn around. A setlist is an evening, with an interval and an encore in it. Tour dates are a live page that corrects itself when a show sells out. And every one of them ships with an embed code, because your own website is where most of you will really use this.

The App: Mainstage (v0.3.8 Work, Landing in Waves)

Mainstage is the logged-in product: bookings, messages, events, payments, and the builders that make your public pages. The released version of both halves is v0.3.7, dated 4 September. Everything below it is v0.3.8 work, landing in waves as each piece passes review rather than waiting for one big release. Twenty-six new features went in this month, on top of 105 smaller fixes.

Where September Started: v0.3.7 Went Out on 4 September

To be straight about dates: v0.3.7 was the August wave, and it was dated and closed on 4 September. The August roundup covered it while it was still in flight, which is why a couple of things in there read as half-announced. Since the 4th, every change on this page has gone live on the web app within a day or two of being written, and most of it has reached the iPhone and Android apps at the following store release. There were a lot of store releases in September. The handful still waiting on a store update is named under What’s Next below.

Your Stage Plot, in Three Dimensions

This is the one I am most pleased with. A stage plot used to be a piece of paper you drew badly at 1am. Now you build it in three dimensions: add the players, the instrument each of them plays, and the gear around them, then turn the stage to any angle to check it reads. The deck is scuffed plywood, there are box trusses overhead with par cans on them, every piece of gear casts a soft shadow, and an LED wall at the back can carry your act’s name. It is a room, not a diagram.

Publish it and you get three outputs at once: a public page, an embed code for your own website, and a printable sheet the venue can put on a clipboard. The stage plot tool page shows two real plots in 3D, with a lit and a blueprint look you can switch between, plus the embeddable widget exactly as a host would see it.

1. Start from a line-up, not an empty stage. Ten ready-made configurations, from solo acoustic to a full function band, lay the stage out in one tap.
2. Say what each person plays. Every instrument arrives knowing how many channels it asks the engineer for, and you can change that if your rig is different.
3. Turn the room and look at it. Drag a piece to move it, turn the stage to check sightlines, and read the stage key: it counts your items, your channels and your monitor mixes at a glance.
4. Publish, then pick your output. The public page for a booker, the embed for your website, the printed sheet for the engineer on the night.

Ten Line-Ups, and a Channel Count an Engineer Recognises

The channel count took the longest and nobody will ever notice it. An amp does not count as an amp: it counts as the cab its instrument is miked through. A keyboard counts as a single line, not two. Get that wrong and your plot asks a 12 channel desk for 18 inputs, which is exactly the argument you were trying to avoid having at 6pm.

The ten line-ups are solo acoustic, duo, backing tracks, power trio, four-piece, five-piece, function band, jazz trio, DJ plus sax, and acoustic trio. Pick the nearest one and edit from there.

A Setlist That Reads Like an Evening

A published setlist is now the whole night on one timeline: first song to encore, every set, the interval, and what the room needs to provide. A booker can read it before making an offer, which is a far better conversation than ‘what do you play?’. It comes in four designs, Marquee, Nightline, Edition and Signal, and you build it in the design you chose, editing each song in place, so what you see while you work is what your audience gets.

Songs drag into order on a phone now. The Song Bank pulls from your setlists, reads as one line per song on a small screen, and keeps the key you typed. Small things, and they are the difference between a tool you use and a tool you open once.

Your EPK as a Press Sheet, or Your Own PDF

The EPK stopped being a stack of cards and became one editorial sheet: the bio opens with a standfirst, tracks play from a gallery of sleeves, videos and reviews sit on a stage with an index, and your strongest figures lead the credentials card. Your live tour page sits inside it, and an embed code puts the whole sheet on your own site.

And if you already have an EPK as a PDF, upload it. It becomes your public EPK page, shown a page at a time with Open and Download buttons, and you can switch back to the built-in one whenever you like without losing anything. Plenty of working musicians have a press kit they paid a designer for. Asking them to retype it into our form was never going to fly.

Tour Dates That Become a Live Page

Your gig list becomes a public tour page in one of seven designs: Cinematic, Signal, Marquee, Nightline, Edition, Monolith and Contact sheet. Every date carries a ticket link and a status badge, a QR code takes the tour away on a fan’s phone, and Add to calendar downloads the shows.

The important part is that it reads your dates rather than remembering them. Mark a show sold out and it is right everywhere at once, including the embed on your own website and the copy inside your EPK. A poster you exported as a picture is wrong the first time anything changes, and it stays wrong for as long as it is up.

Eleven Flyer Designs, and One You Build Yourself

Flyers arrived as an editorial collection: Edition, Afterimage, Typeset, Contact Sheet, Amplifier, Broadside, Backline, Underpass, Frequency, Cover Story, and a Nation festival bill that brought it to eleven. Each one comes in poster, story and feed sizes. Fill in the night, add your photos and a logo, pick a theme, download it. Press Publish and the flyer gets its own page on your profile, an embed code, and an optional QR code beside the ticket link.

Every design now fits your words however long they run, so a five-band bill is never quietly cut off, and they gained real print finishes, paper textures and shadows. A Custom builder joins them for people who would rather start from a layout and choose the type, colours, finish and size themselves. Everything you made before sits under Classic in My Flyers, unchanged.

What Each Maker Publishes

Six makers, and between them one habit: a public page, a live embed for your own website, and something you can hand over on the night. Not every one of them does all three, so the table says which does what.

Messages: Nothing You Send Goes Missing

Messages got the unglamorous half of the month. Your message appears in the thread the instant you hit send, shows Sending, then settles to Sent. If it fails it stays put as Not sent with your exact words kept, and one tap retries it. Nobody should have to retype a fee they already typed.

You can attach more than a photo now: images, video, audio and documents, including Word, PowerPoint, Excel and plain text, up to 25 MB each. Useful when a booker asks for your press kit or a stage plan halfway through a conversation. Scrolling up for older messages keeps your place, searching inside a chat highlights the words again, and deleting a pinned message unpins it too, so the pinned strip never points at something that is gone.

Several Bookings, One Conversation

Messages now keeps a single thread per person, and duplicates were merged with every message kept. A conversation can carry as many bookings as you like: each one shows its latest offer card, older cards for the same booking read Superseded, and every card reflects that booking’s current status even after you switch apps and come back. If you play the same room four times a year, that is now one conversation with four offers in it, rather than four threads you have to remember the order of.

Availability That Repeats on Your Cycle

Set the days you are free and the hours you work, then have that pattern repeat every one, two, three or four weeks. Each week in the cycle can carry its own hours, so an alternating rota reads correctly instead of forcing you to block dates by hand every month. Your profile calendar and the availability strip follow it without you going back in, and you can drag the strip on a profile to move between weeks. Blocking or freeing a night now applies in one go, so your availability is never briefly wrong while it saves.

Explore, Rebuilt Around Who You Are Looking For

Explore used to be one page with every filter on it. Now artists, venues, agents, promoters, open gigs, your favourites and the classifieds board each get their own hub, showing only the filters that make sense there, and Browse leads with photographs. Search can filter by star rating, by whether someone has photos or videos, and by postcode. Find Gigs gained an Equipment Provided filter, and venue search takes a date you need the room to be free.

One fix in there deserves naming: the experience and commission filters used to hide agents and promoters who had not filled those fields in, so a whole rail looked emptier than it really was.

Browsing Without an Account

Explore itself sits behind the login, but most of what it points at does not. If you are weighing us up, or you just want to know what is on this week, these are open to anyone and need no sign-up.

Insights: What You Have Actually Earned

A new Insights page on your dashboard shows your real earnings from bookings made on GigXchange. If a figure cannot be loaded it says so, rather than showing you £0 and letting you believe you had a quiet month. The Payments and Invoices pages were redesigned in the same pass, and the figures on them are clearer and more reliable. For what the wider market pays, the August GX Index put UK gig fees between £330 and £1,489, and the Musicians’ Union national gig rates are the floor worth knowing before you quote.

Help That Walks You Through the Screen You Are On

Help was rebuilt as an eight-chapter guide with a screenshot of every core feature, search across every answer, and a chapter picker that travels with you on a phone. Alongside it sit 30 step-by-step guides, each one written by walking the page it describes and illustrated with real screenshots. The shelf on your toolkit page shows the set for your role, and All user guides opens the whole library. On the public side the help centre now holds 55 plain-English answers, including a new one on the difference between a gig, a booking and an event. A help link can carry your question straight into the contact form, so you do not retype what we already know, and the glossary defines each industry term in its own right with a link across to the tool it relates to. The public walkthroughs live on user guides.

The App Reads Like a Magazine

The last one is a look, and it matters more than a look should. Pages open the way a magazine does: a cover photograph, a contents run of what is inside, and chapters you read straight down. Your profile, dashboard, bookings, events, Explore, settings and every builder share it, so once you know one page you know them all. Your dashboard opens with a rotating banner walking through Artists, Venues, Availability, Spotlight and Help, the same banner whatever your role, plus a Tools launcher showing your own role’s tools as photo cards. Press Pause if you would rather it sat still.

The same treatment reached the compliance tools. Gig Rescue, the Licence Checker and the Compliance Checklist now read as editorial pages: one question at a time, a running order you can follow, and numbered tasks with a progress meter for each section. If Martyn’s Law is the thing keeping you up, the government factsheets are the primary source. There is also a What’s New page inside the app now, with a Being Discussed strip where you can tell us what you make of what we shipped.

The Website (v0.3.8 Work, Still Landing)

The public site is how people find us without an account, and September was deliberately lighter there: four headline changes and 22 smaller ones, because the app needed the month. The Release Notes page carries the full list for both halves.

A Member Directory You Can Actually Browse

The member directory now leads with photos and video, keeps a shortlist of up to four members pinned as you browse, and opens a rich preview of anyone you pick without taking you off the page. On a phone that preview reads as a proper full-screen card: full-width cover picture, no sideways drift as you scroll, one tap to open. The members who joined most recently fan out across a moving stage on the homepage, so you can see who has arrived at a glance and open any of them from there. Event cards line up with the profile cards, with the date top-left, and the map is lighter on phones.

Tool Pages That Preview the Real Thing

The free tool pages used to show you a picture of the tool. Now they open the live page. Scroll the tour page previews on a phone and you get all seven designs as they really render, the setlist page carries two live setlists so you can compare the new interactive designs against the classic view, the stage plot page shows two real plots in 3D, and the flyer maker tiles open the real published flyer rather than a screenshot of one. A picture of a tool tells you nothing about whether the tool is any good.

The Site Moves Quicker

Pages start drawing sooner, the moving parts settle down the moment they scroll out of view, and stepping from one page to the next feels close to instant. Pages reveal themselves as you scroll rather than arriving all at once, blog tables with four columns or fewer fit a phone screen without sideways scrolling, and votes on blog posts and open mics count every time. Every issue of the GX Index also carries its own citable DOI now, and both the cite box and the methodology page point at the latest issue’s record.

September, by Role

Three cards: artists, venues, and everyone who never logs in. If you only read one thing on this page, read the one that is yours.

What’s Next, and What Is Not Finished

1. Rescheduling in the app. Propose a new date and have the other side accept it, without going through us.
2. Full agent matching. Smart Match built around how agents actually work, across a whole roster.
3. EPK Builder v2. Full mobile editing, and steadier widgets.
4. Richer public profiles. Verified booking history and review scores on public profile pages.
5. Guides that point at the right tool. Our guides and tool pages will link each other up, so you land on the thing that solves your problem.

Now the things that are not finished, because a roundup that only lists wins is an advert. Light mode is paused while we finish it, so the app stays dark for now; the switch is still there and explains itself. The installed phone apps keep the older single offer card per conversation, and the narrower list of chat attachment types, until their next store update, while the web app already has both. A member who has not set any availability rules shows as fully available on their own calendar but does not appear in availability-filtered searches until they set one. And on a narrow phone the 3D stage can leave a dropped item just off the front edge of the floor: turn the stage or drag it back a touch and it settles. All of it is listed under Known issues on the Release Notes page, where it belongs.

If you missed what came before, the monthly release log collects every one of these, and August sits directly behind this one. Elsewhere in September we published the Brexit touring report, the Welsh business rates cut, a count of UK open mics against spreading busking bans, and the September Hardest Working Rooms leaderboard: four of the eight new reads that went up in September. If something on this page does not work the way you expected, the contact form reaches me, not a queue.

Annual refresh commitment

This guide was published on 30 September 2026 and is refreshed every September. Platform features and roadmap priorities evolve month to month, so annual verification matters. We re-verify every reference, recommendation, and data point once a year. Next scheduled refresh: September 2027. If any claim is outdated before then, email support@gigxchange.app and we will update it within 24 hours.