My achievements and failures of 2017

I have always been fascinated by how some cool guys write their end of the year list of achievements. It’s like, you read and think: “Wow!”, and it makes you want to work harder. This time I’ll try to make such list by myself but also be adding failures to it. Failures are no less interesting than success and give even more experience.

Grab yourself a cup of tea.

Music

This year I released my by far the most important release to this date — the second studio album, “2000 Years Ahead”. It’s not only cool thematically, but also production-wise: I feel that it sounds way better than my debut album, despite the fact I always criticise myself. It’s a good thing.

Frankly, I was slacking the first half of the year production-wise, but things get better when I gave a public promise to make more music. And in fact, I keep this promise: so far I released a new single on Digital Om Productions that spent a month in the Top-100 charts, just signed a new track on Iono Music that will be out in early 2018, and have some more in production.

Gigs

This year I played in Switzerland for the second time, and the geography of my gigs expanded to Greece and the UK. I also gave a talk in Moscow, a completely new format for me. I feel I have a bit more confidence in public speaking now.

I don’t have as many gigs as I would like to, but it’s okay. when I think about it that a regular bedroom producer gots recognition and invitation to perform in another part of the world, I feel lucky and grateful. Somehow I look positive on these things.

Education

This year my advice series reached 100 articles. A hundred (a counting) useful articles on music production, sound design, management, marketing, and music industry. I mean, how cool is that? It may sound like bragging, but I don’t know any acting music producer who would share so much useful information based on his own experience. If you know any — let me, I’d be glad to read it. Seriously.

Also, this year I started a video blog. No, it’s certainly a good thing, but making a video content quickly and regularly is a something I haven’t learned yet. The whole video production is a so new thing to do. Besides, speaking to the camera still is not easy for me, so there’s a lot of work to be done here as well.

Audience

Numbers-wise, my social media pages now have about 23.000 followers in total. It’s great to see that my audience grows, slowly but surely. I also launched Psytrance Guide, a project made purely out of enthusiasm which all of a sudden gave a huge audience boost. And the cool thing about that I’ve made it just three days and spent no money at all (well, just for the domain name) — the resources to the results ratio is just fantastic.

With all of that, I feel that I could do better promotion-wise: more Instagram stories, more mixes, more new interesting formats. Going to work on that.

Personal

This year I turned 30. Not quite something to brag about, but still. Achievement unlocked. I also started tracking my family budget and run more kilometres at a better pace than the previous year.

I may seem like a very organised person, but in fact, I’m quite a mess: one day I work on a schedule, complete my to-do’s and so on, and the other day I can spend an hour playing on some mobile game or watching YouTube. The balance between productivity and procrastination is something that I still searching for.

Typically I don’t write in public about my personal stuff and focus only on professional music-related topics, but let me know if you’d like me to write about personal productivity and all that things, among the rest.

What’re your thoughts?

Happy New Year!