Finances 2025

Table of Contents

• 2024 In Review
• 2025 Expenses
• 2026
  • Objective and Priorities
  • Budget

2025 In Review

Before diving into goals and objective for the 2025 Composuary, I wanted to spend some time reviewing the previous year's stated objectives and outlining how things went.

Headwinds

In general, the 2025 year did not go to plan. Unfortunately, a number of substantial life events greatly impacted my ability to prep for, operate, and participate in the 2025 Composuary. Between dealing with immigration and returning to school, there was little time available to run 2025 the way that I had hoped. With that in mind, the following is a report on the stated objectives from 2024 into 2025.

Get 50 active participants

Composuary is still a very small community and information about it is still spread, predominantly, through word-of-mouth. Given the small operating budget, there is very little room to do paid promotion. Looking forward towards the next year, this trend will likely continue. As per the struggles outlined in the Headwinds section, the operating budget for Composuary will continue to be extraordinarily tight.

Live Performance During the Gala

The Gala this year was a very small and intimate event. Unfortunately, I do not believe that this particular goal will be feasible until the event is much larger than it currently is. While I still dream of this, it will need to be put on the back-burner for quite a while yet.

Incorporate Composuary

Due to my legal status in Canada, there isn't currently a sensible way for Composuary to become a legal entity separated from myself. This will continue to limit opportunities to find grants and other types of external financing.

Upgrade Website

While I'm technically savvy enough to manage an overhaul of the website myself, constraints on my time since last year have made that task impossible. The current format and structure of the site is likely to continue into the next year or two.

Create Educational Video Content

This was quite a lofty goal, and I genuinely forgot that I had even set it as a target. The intent for this was to provide ways to on-ramp more people to the project who may find the prospect of writing music rather intimidating. The motivation behind this goal is still relevant and I'll be exploring it more in preparation for 2026, but I do not think that I have the capacity nor skill necessary to facilitate this.

Expenses

2025 Expenses

2026

Objectives and Priorities

Looking forward to 2026, I need to acknowledge that my time will continue to be heavily constrained. I'll be building towards a graduations project during January/February of next year and as such, I have drastically cut down on my hopeful goals going forwards. As a major focus for next year, I'm looking to have this project finally hit some type of "ignition" point where there is enough community support for it to be self propagating. With that in mind

1. Get 20 active participants: In an attempt to reach more people, I'll be putting a very small amount of money into advertising. This will likely be the sort for business cards and other paraphernalia to give a greater sense that this project is long lasting and worth people's consideration.
2. Automate the Event: Much of the work that goes into running Composuary during the month of February is pretty redundant IT things. While it isn't very hard to update the website everyday with the latest prompts, I've struggled to maintain consistent times. Looking to the next year, I'm looking to automate many portions of that process so the day-to-day operations during February aren't dependent on me being within an arm's reach of a computer.
3. Improve Social Media Presence: Up until now, the extent of Composuary's social media presence is just Discord. I've done this for a particular reason: I greatly dislike broadcast social media. I do acknowledge this has limited the ability for Composuary to find people without direct invite. As such, I'll be exploring ways to integrate small bits of social media to the project. I'm weary of this move as it firmly puts the control of this project in the hands of companies that I do not trust and might lead to "algorithm gaming" which I feel will deeply undermine what I'm wanting for this project: a genuine community of artists trying to improve their craft and be playful.
4. Back Archive Year 1: The first year of Composuary took place on a private Discord server that I ran with a few of my friends. The event was smaller then (even smaller the now). The pieces that went into that event are currently not available as an album, and for the sake of completion, I'd love to go back and fix that.
5. Rebuild the Website: The current website is using an autogenerating template called mdBook. While this was suitable for getting the project started, it doesn't feel very homey or welcoming and I'd love to rebuild the website from scratch to be a place that better reflect the identity of Composuary. I do recognize the disparity between this wish and the above claim from the 2025 In Review section, but one can dream!

Budget

With the above stated goals, this is the projected budget for 2026. Barring unexpected luck with finally finding a grant that this project is eligible for, I suspect that there will only be enough to finance through tranche 1.