Composer Business Skills: What are KPI’s?

Composers very easily fall into the artist side of the art vs business divide, however having a few basic business skills and understandings can definitely help a freelance composer develop and grow their business. With that in mind, an important concept in the business world is that of “KPI’s” or Key Performance Indicators. This is any metric you are tracking to help you achieve your goals. They can be literally anything, and in fact some goals may have multiple KPI’s and some may just have one.

So as a composer, how exactly can we utilize this?

Well for starters lets identify your goals and define what success is to you.  Perhaps you feel a successful composer has 10 commissions a year. Maybe you think it means a 1000 people in your mailing list or 25,000 monthly listeners. Whatever your goal is, it should be something objective - something numerical that we can quantify and track rather than being subjective or based in opinion. For our example, we will say we want to make $30,000 this year from composing alone.

The obvious KPI in this case would be how much money we made out of that goal. Or is it? When the KPI is tracking your goal (such as the financial example earlier), there are often smaller KPI’s associated with it. A strong KPI tracks performance. It would absolutely be wise to track how much money is coming in in regards to that goal, so that is one KPI, however another item that would be important to track would be how many people you are reaching out to. One of these KPI’s tracks the goal and the other tracks how much you are working towards that goal. You can look at the income KPI and wonder “why the hell am I not making money any faster?”, but if you look at the performance based KPI you will likely see and realize, “Oh yeah, I’m reaching out to 2, maybe 3 people a month total and that’s probably causing it.”

Both of these are important to track. One tracks your progress towards the goal and the other tracks the actions taken to help achieve that goal. When the sub-KPI’s are being consistently hit and the goal KPI isn’t seeing any movement that is a good sign it is time to change another variable.

So what even makes a good KPI?

Good KPIs typically have 5 traits in regards to your goal. They are specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timed. SMART.

Specific - You are very clear on exactly what your KPI is measuring

Measurable - your KPI must be something that can be tracks (Ie, number of followers, emails sent, etc)

Achievable - Your KPI must be something that can be achieved.

Realistic - Your KPI should be possible with the resources you have available

Timed - Your KPI should be tracking this stat over time. It doesn’t make sense to track how many cold contacts you’ve made if you’re looking at a life time number. You want to set goals in terms of days, weeks, months, or quarters.

With this all in mind, here are some KPIs for composers that might be worth considering

Make X amount of Social Media posts per month

Cold Contact X amount of film makers per week

Write X amount of pieces per quarter

Create X amount of fully produced orchestral mock ups a week

Attend X amount of networking events a month

Comment on X amount of game developers post a day

Make X amount of money from Y income stream

Increase new commission inquiries to X amount over 2 months

So for all you composers out there looking to get more work - ask yourself: how many people have you reached out lately, if at all? If you don’t know, that’s a good reason to start tracking.

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