In formal music education, teachers typically design individualised and deliberate practice to foster continuous performance improvement by setting goals, monitoring progress, and providing feedback. In contrast, popular music bands often act autonomously. This raises the question of how popular music bands approach aspects of deliberate practice in self-managed contexts. This qualitative study explores what goals semi-professional and professional popular music bands set, how they monitor their performance, and how they handle feedback—both in collective and individual contexts. A total of 39 musicians from nine semi-professional and three professional popular music bands participated in the study. The findings indicate that both groups adopt aspects of deliberate practice, albeit with differing emphases and degrees of systematicity. Semi-professional bands prioritised collective songwriting and the continuous creation of new music, often accompanied by unsystematic performance monitoring. Feedback predominantly focused on songwriting and often provided by personal networks. In contrast, professional bands reported striving for fine-grained improvements in both collective and individual performance within their existing repertoire. They regularly reflected on and analysed their performances. They also received frequent constructive feedback from one another other as well as from their professional staff, such as sound engineers. This reduced their reliance on informal feedback sources. The findings suggest that professional bands in particular establish constructive self-managed approaches that benefit their collective and individual performance. These insights into learning in informal music contexts may also inform other domains, such as workplace teams, where performance and learning are shaped by the interplay between collective and individual contexts.