Dubai Sound Academy's Story
Adam Long has been immersed in music since the age of four. His background is in performance, not education, but when COVID-19 brought the entertainment industry to a halt in 2020, he found himself looking at a gap in the Dubai market: there were almost no engaging, accessible music education programmes for children and young people. After-school activities were still running. The demand was there. The supply was not.
What started as Original Mix DJs, a Saturday DJ club for a handful of students, grew faster than Adam had planned. Word spread among parents and schools. Soon, Original Mix DJs was expanding its offerings, adding Sundays and partnering with local schools to bring DJ clubs to after-school programs. Within a short time, Adam and his co-founder Yaz Rahman were managing dozens of energetic students across multiple sessions each week, which was when the system behind the scenes started to show its limits. The academy rebranded as Dubai Sound Academy as the programme expanded, offering DJ and electronic music production classes for all ages. However, success brought its own challenges. The teaching was working. The administration was not.
"It was time-consuming," Adam recalls. Every new student meant more paperwork, more logins, and a higher chance of errors. Yaz, managing the administrative side, echoes Adam's sentiment. Juggling Google Docs, spreadsheets, and emails while keeping enrolment records accurate was exactly as chaotic as it sounds. Then, Classcard brought harmony to the chaos. "It's definitely streamlined Adam's business," Yaz says with a smile.
How Dubai Sound Academy Uses Classcard
5 platforms reduced to 1
The administrative stack that had been running Dubai Sound Academy behind the scenes (Google Docs, Excel, Stripe, QuickBooks, and email) was replaced by a single platform. That consolidation eliminated the duplication of effort that had been costing Adam and Yaz hours each week. Information no longer needed to be entered in multiple places. Updates no longer risked falling through the gaps between systems.
An estimated 8 hours per week reclaimed
The cumulative time cost of managing five separate platforms, entering data manually across all of them, and reconciling information that should have lived in one place was significant. Classcard returned those hours to the team. For an academy run by a small team focused on delivering quality music education, that reclaimed time goes directly into the work that matters.
Invoicing on autopilot
The Stripe integration was one of the clearest wins. Payment processing had previously required manual steps to flow from Stripe into QuickBooks and generate accurate invoices. With Classcard, that entire process became automatic. Payments process, invoices generate, and the records are accurate without anyone having to make it happen manually. For an academy managing dozens of enrolments across multiple school partnerships, that reliability matters considerably.