Ritz Music Studio is a multi-award-winning music center that provides personalized in-person instruction, public practice spaces, and global connections with music educators around the world through its 'The Music Book' database. With six rentable studio spaces equipped with a variety of instruments, Ritz provides a flexible, educational environment for all levels of musicianship.
Richmond, UK
Music Studio
London is an internationally recognized music hub, packed with thousands of people seeking spaces to play and ways to improve in the city’s growing music industry. Driven by the desire to hone their skills, yet limited by the reality of tightly packed apartment buildings, musicians turn to rentable spaces where they can jam as loud as they’d like.
Ritz Music Studio, a multi-award-winning music education facility, saw the potential. With six spaces available, and lessons happening sporadically throughout the day, they quickly recognized an opportunity to generate more revenue during downtime. Unfortunately, time and resources stood in the way. Manually booking their spaces out was simply not an option, as it would require too much administrative work, from juggling emails to handling cancellations and rebookings. Michael Stephenson-Green, owner of Ritz Music Studio, is busy running all other areas of the business, and states that he “simply doesn’t have the time to do it himself.” Other platforms also lacked the functionalities they needed, so this left them on the hunt for a solution that could help them scale both operationally and financially.
Here’s how they did it with AllBooked.
Before AllBooked, Ritz Music Studio had one core offering: top-notch music lessons. Afterward, they were bringing in a steady second stream of income. How? Simply by making empty spaces easy to book. And that’s the key: easy.
While the team had long seen the untapped potential of making unused studio spaces available to rent during downtime, they didn’t have the resources to make it happen. Stephenson-Green envisioned more emails flooding his inbox asking about booking details, features, and availability, cutting into his already limited time.
He notes, “we probably just would not have rented our space out to the open public without the platform.” Yet, AllBooked made it happen. As Stephenson-Green puts it, “it has made something that the business has always been possible of doing, possible. Whereas from an admin point of view, I just didn't have the time to do it myself.”
Results quickly followed adoption. Ritz Music Studio saw room occupancy increase by at least 60%, and with that came additional revenue.
“We were making zero from those rooms, and now we make £20,000 a year from them alone.”
As a venue that shares spaces between educators and students alike, Ritz Music Studio has a unique pricing structure that requires complex booking and pricing rules. Their model strikes a careful balance between attracting and rewarding teachers, while ensuring the studio remains profitable.
To configure this, Ritz uses a combination of user tags and pricing rules within AllBooked. These features allow the team to price spaces differently depending on which user is making a booking.
Stephenson-Green finds the tagging system “really, really useful because [they] have lots of different levels of teachers that need various access at different prices.”
The very first thing that Stephenson-Green brought up on our call was AllBooked’s interactive map feature. As you’d expect from an award-winning studio, demand was high, which meant that, before AllBooked, he was spending hours on manual administrative tasks like responding to emails that asked the same questions over and over. Stephenson-Green notes, “They needed the information about what’s in the room, the size of the room, what it was suitable for and not suitable for”—the list goes on—leaving him with little to no time to work on other areas of the business.
This is where AllBooked’s interactive map view came into play and gave his customers a clear visual understanding of the space. When customers book, they see a custom map designed by AllBooked that provides a birds-eye view of booking availability, images of each studio, and unique attributes assigned to each space, leaving no question unanswered.
According to Stephenson-Green, it took the manual component of booking email inquiries entirely out of the picture: “It was at least a 5 to 6 booking email chain, and it's gone from that to none.” He adds, “Being able to put all that into the interactive map reduced the amount of questions we've been asked by about 80%.”
Another major draw of AllBooked was the user interface, and the simplicity with which both teachers and the public can make bookings.
Stephenson-Green notes, “We've used other systems in the past where I've had lots of questions about how to use it, how to make it work, how to get it working on their phone… We've had none about this. They took it on straight away.”
Instructors especially appreciate the functionality to book well in advance—so much so that it’s sparked a bit of friendly competition among them to secure rooms early. With the book now, pay later and repeat bookings options, Ritz gives bookers the flexibility to make as many reservations as they’d like without paying upfront.
What was once a venue that offered lessons only, Ritz Music Studio now serves a dual purpose as a music education facility, and a studio rental facility—the latter made possible by AllBooked. The business reaches a wider audience and generates more income without any additional administrative burden, proving they’ve successfully scaled both operationally and financially. Yet, Ritz isn’t the only one who benefits from AllBooked—their customers love it as well.
When comparing other options in the market, Stephenson-Green notes that he’s had customers say, “Look, because I can book it so quickly, I do”—and if that alone doesn’t make the difference clear, consider this: in an industry with a lot of competition, ease wins.
