DarkStage is a tablet-first setlist and performance management app for musicians.
Hi, I’m Josh, and I developed DarkStage. This app exists because I need something like it and nothing like it was out there for Android.
I’m a gigging musician with poor vision. I’ve been playing bass for many years in both cover and original bands, and I’ve had poor vision my whole life.
I was born completely blind, and modern medicine fixed that, but damage was done. Since then, I lost my vision in 2023 through terrible luck, and after having that fixed I lost most of it again through even worse luck. My vision is close to where it was before everything went sideways in 2023, but it wasn’t good to begin with. Being a gigging musician, dealing with paper setlists on dark stages was always problematic, sometimes to the point where I couldn’t read them at all and just waited for someone to kick off the next song. Since I have a long career in IT and a fair bit of experience contributing to various open-source projects (including Android ROMs and similar) over the years, I decided to create something that would make my gigging life a lot easier, and hopefully it’ll help others as well.
Before I developed this app, I looked around for an app that would suit my needs. Why re-invent the wheel if there’s a perfectly good one out there already? There was a dearth of apps to begin with, and none of them were geared towards people with less-than-perfect vision. Some that could somewhat be useful were obviously written for different tasks and not geared towards the needs of musicians.
So I built DarkStage for myself first. Every feature in it exists because I needed it on an actual stage or to help get me to the stage, not because it looked good on a feature list.
Anyway, here’s a feature list:
I also can’t stand subscription models or ads. Getting nagged every month for an app you already paid for, or fighting through ads on a screen you need to actually read mid-song, doesn’t belong anywhere near a stage. Generally I think the software-subscription model sucks. DarkStage Pro is a one-time, flat-fee unlock; you buy it once and you won’t ever get bothered about it again.
Shameless plug: I’m in a band called Ego Trip. You can find us at:
DarkStage is still actively developed, and it’s still shaped by actually using it at gigs. Most fixes and features in this app started as something that went wrong, or something I wished it did, at an actual gig. Many bugs and feature requests also came in from other gigging musicians that have tested the app out for me.
If you’re a musician who’s ever had a hard time wrangling or reading a setlist on stage, DarkStage is for you.