Support for pop musicians, but artists remain on the margins

PRS for Music Foundation (PRSF), the funding body for new music initiatives, has been chosen to deliver Arts Council England’s (ACE) music industry talent development fund. It will deliver small grants of up to £15k to mid-career contemporary musicians to help with performing, recording, writing and touring. £500k will be injected from ACE over two years, with a further £50k for the scheme coming from PRSF itself. The project will be launched to the public in May. ACE Chief Executive Alan Davey said: “…it is becoming increasingly difficult for talent to find the right kind of investment at the right time to allow them to get to the stage of making a living from creating and performing music. This fund is the beginning of something that I hope will grow, and that we will learn from.”
But the Artists Information Company (a-n) has challenged ACE to replicate this “breakthrough for musicians” across other artforms. Recent research commissioned by a-n revealed that in 2009/10 less than 2.5% of artists were directly funded by ACE, and anecdotal evidence suggests that little has changed since. a-n points out that the challenges individual artists face are insufficiently addressed in present public and private sources, saying that  the majority of funds are simply not open to individual artists and support for the next generation of artists is particularly thin on the ground.