What New Year’s Should Mean to Your Music

Every New Year’s comes new resolutions: people with good intentions to make changes for improving their life. As artists, we should be taking a lesson from how the business world handles things – not just making a lofty personal, but creating specific goals that can be measured. In fact, many organizations go by the SMART goals system:

S – Specific
M – Measurable
A – Attainable
R – Realistic
T – Timely

Take this moment to review the past year with everyone on your team: your band members, manager, publicist, booking agent, sponsors, etc. and see what you’ve done in the past year. Look for major milestones that you achieved and what got you there. See what the failures were and what you can do to avoid them. Then take the information and create goals for 2011 in regards to your music. Then, create a plan on how you can reach each of those goals. Every 3 months, review what you’ve been doing and if you’re on track in meeting your annual goals.

Here are some examples of areas that you might want to cover:

– Live Performances (amount of shows, types of venues, festivals, attendance)
– Publicity (print, radio, websites, etc.)
– Website traffic (both to your main site as well as your social networking sites)
– Music sold or distributed
– Lineup changes
– Internal problems to be resolved
– Cash flow
– Fan interaction

Whatever it is, choose a handful of the areas most important for you to concentrate on, then make sure everything that you do in the upcoming year relates to and works towards your goals.

Knowing how to run your music efficiently as a business with key indicators will help attract new sponsors, investors, and help you grow as a musician.