New year, new you: How to set and reach your musical goals in 2026
This year’s resolution? Finally get SMART about writing, producing, and performing your own music
Statistically, only about 10% of New Year’s resolutions actually stick — oh dear. If you were one of the 10% in 2025, congratulations; we’d advise you to stop reading now and keep doing whatever it is you’re doing. For the rest of us? It’s time to improve those odds.
You’ve probably heard of SMART goals: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. You may, in fact, have heard about them many times before and even tried them in the past, but bear with us.
SMART goals are popular for a reason: they work — at least when applied properly. They’re derived from the world of business, and most of the advice out there considers them in that context, but as music makers, we tend to have different needs (and different tolerances for spreadsheets and performance reviews, too).
So we’ve set out to break down what this well-worn acronym really means for us in 2026. Follow along for a new spin on some old advice, and join us in making 2026 the year we finally get SMART about making music.
Specific
This one’s pretty easy to understand, but requires a little bit of thought to implement. The trick is to make sure your goal is precise enough to know exactly what you’re aiming for and to recognize whether or not you’ve achieved it. It’s also about removing your wiggle room or any ability future-you has to shift the goalposts.
“I want to get better at music production,” for example, is a valid sentiment, but it’s not a specific goal, so we need to narrow it down. You might want to get better at working in a particular genre, for example, or up a specific part of your production game — like sound design or mixing. That’s a little better, but these are big topics, and it still leaves us room to wonder what exactly we need to do to progress.
If we can drill that down to the exact techniques we want to master, we’re heading in the right direction. In our experience, it’s better to have several related and specific goals than one bigger one.
“Learn to use parallel compression” is better than “get better at mixing”.
“Read the manual for Equator2” is better than “learn to use a synth”.
“Finish five tracks” is better than “make more music”.
Measurable
Like specificity, measurability is all about knowing exactly what you’re aiming for. Get clear on this, and you’ll know exactly how you’re doing as the year goes on, as well as the precise moment when you’ve achieved your aims. It’s hard to celebrate your wins if you don’t know you’ve won, after all.
An easy way to make sure your goals are measurable is simply to put a number on them. If that number is one (e.g., “finish one album”), you might consider breaking your goal down into something that gives you a better sense of progress throughout the year (like “finish ten tracks”). If you’re aiming for ten tracks by December 31st and have five under your belt by May, you know you’re ahead of schedule.
A bonus of breaking down bigger goals this way is that it gives you incremental checkpoints that can help you stay motivated.
“Create ten new synth patches” is better than “do more sound design”.
“Add 100 new SoundCloud followers” is better than “grow my fan base”.
“Book ten shows” is better than “play out more”.
Achievable
It’s important to aim high — but overdoing it can lead to a loss of motivation. If you’re aiming to reach a certain number of followers, finish a certain number of tracks, or sell a certain number of downloads, for example, it pays to consider what’s realistic for you right now. By all means, challenge yourself; that’s what goals are for, but make sure it’s within reason; if your follower count is trending towards 1,000 by the end of the year, try aiming for a few hundred extra, rather than 50,000.
When asking yourself, “Can I achieve this goal?” it pays to consider the subject: you. That is, can you, through your actions alone, make it happen? We’re not saying adding social followers is a bad idea, or even a bad goal, but unless you’re creating accounts and following yourself, it’s not fully in your hands — the same goes for anything involving record deals, bookings, or other people in general.
Again, all of these things might be part of valid and useful goals, but you might consider ways to turn them around and give yourself full control over your success or failure. From this perspective:
“Post on Instagram three times per week” is better than “gain 500 new followers”.
“Email twenty new promoters” is better than “book five shows”.
“Pitch tracks to five new labels” is better than “get a track signed”.
Relevant
This one might be the most useful when we have multiple goals to think about. Previously, we mentioned the value of breaking down bigger goals into smaller, easily measurable ones. Relevance is all about making sure the goals we set for ourselves, big or small, are all moving us in the direction we want to go.
Let’s throw “Achievable” out the window for a moment and consider where we want to be several years from now. “Get a Billboard number one” is probably not a great New Year’s resolution (contact us for a free Seaboard if you prove us wrong), but if that’s a long-term goal that motivates you, then go for it.
If we break that big, ambitious goal down to what we can achieve in the next year that leads us in the right direction (like “write an album of pop music”) and then break that down to even smaller goals (like “write one pop song per month” or even “read three books about pop songwriting”) we can be sure that all our efforts are aligned with the big picture.
If our end goal really is that Billboard number one:
“Write ten pop songs” is (probably) better than “buy ten synth modules”.
“Take a songwriting class” is better than “take violin lessons”.
“Collaborate with ten other musicians” is better than “master every step of the production process myself.”
Time-bound
Easy, right? You have until midnight on January 1st, 2027. If you’ve been following our advice so far, though, and breaking down your big goals into smaller ones that complement each other, you’ll have quite a few items on your list that ought to be finished throughout the year, not just at the end.
The goal here is just to make sure you’re giving yourself the right amount of time to hit the necessary milestones or checkpoints for your bigger ambitions. This will make it easy to keep an eye on progress and know whether you’re on track throughout the year.
“Write one song per month” is better than “write twelve songs”.
“Finish recording guitar parts by July” is better than “finish the album”.
“Learn about one new mixing technique every week” is better than “learn to mix”.
New year, new gear?
Looking to refresh your setup for 2026? We’ve got just the thing — check the ROLI store for expressive controllers, powerful software synths, and inspiring sound packs. There’s also still time to grab a great deal on our new flagship keyboard controller, ROLI Piano.
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