Class, equity and what we want music funding to achieve
I spend a lot of my working life talking to developing artists, whether through education, mentoring, management or simply conversations with musicians trying to work out what to do next. Increasingly, funding comes into those conversations. There is money available to support new music in the UK through organisations such as Arts Council England, PRS Foundation, Help Musicians and Youth Music, alongside regional programmes and funds designed to address particular inequalities. Yet the more I encounter this landscape, the more I find myself wondering about a fairly fundamental question: what exactly do we want music funding to do?
Should funding primarily correct historic inequality, support financial need, increase cultural diversity, encourage artistic risk or invest in artists capable of developing sustainable careers? Should geography matter? Should socioeconomic background matter more than it currently does? There are perfectly reasonable arguments for all of these objectives, but they are not necessarily the same objective. When resources are finite, somebody eventually has to decide what constitutes need, potential and cultural value, and which of those things should matter most.
There is also a distinction worth making between helping musicians establish financially sustainable careers and expecting public investment to generate a commercial return. The two are not necessarily the same thing. Some music has considerable cultural value without obvious commercial potential, and there is a legitimate argument that public funding should support work the marketplace would otherwise struggle to sustain. Equally, helping musicians earn a living from their work is surely a reasonable ambition. Different funding programmes can serve different purposes, but understanding those purposes seems a sensible place to start.
The financial reality of being a musician makes this more than an abstract argument. The first UK Musicians' Census, based on responses from almost 6,000 musicians, found that average annual income from music was £20,700 and that 43 per cent of musicians earned less than £14,000 from music. More than half needed income from outside the industry to sustain their careers. Perhaps even more relevant to the funding debate, 46 per cent reported cost-related barriers restricting their careers, including the cost of equipment, cited by 30 per cent, transport by 27 per cent and training by 18 per cent. A quarter said that not knowing anybody in the industry was itself a barrier to progression.
Those figures resonate with what I see when working with developing musicians. I started thinking about this particularly through young people making guitar music. Imagine four 19-year-olds starting a band somewhere in Greater Manchester. They need instruments, amps and drums, somewhere to rehearse, transport to rehearsals and gigs and, eventually, money to record and release music. Perhaps none of their parents works in the music industry. They might be working in a pub, shop or supermarket while trying to keep the band going, and their contribution towards a rehearsal room genuinely matters.
They are also making music in a city region that has produced Oasis, The Smiths, Joy Division, New Order, The Stone Roses and many other internationally successful guitar bands. Of course, Greater Manchester's musical heritage extends well beyond guitar music, with electronic music, soul, hip-hop and numerous other scenes contributing to its cultural identity and international reputation. Nevertheless, guitar music is an established part of that identity and has generated considerable commercial and cultural value. It would be easy, consciously or otherwise, to regard that particular musical tradition as something that has already enjoyed considerable opportunity.
The historic success of Oasis, however, tells us almost nothing about the economic circumstances of four teenagers trying to start a band in Greater Manchester today. The commercial success of a genre is not evidence that the next generation of musicians working within it has access to money, equipment, rehearsal space, transport or professional networks. There is an important distinction between the position historically occupied by a musical genre and the circumstances of an individual artist making that music now.
I should make something clear at this point. I haven't found evidence that guitar artists are systematically disadvantaged by UK music funding, and I'm not suggesting that they are. What interests me is whether the circumstances of individual musicians are always sufficiently understood, particularly when the music they make belongs to a genre with an established commercial history. The same question could reasonably be asked about musicians working in any genre.
This isn't an argument against targeted funding. There are well-established reasons for interventions intended to address underrepresentation within music, and there is evidence that some of the inequalities those interventions are responding to remain very real. Analysis from the Musicians' Census found an income gap between white musicians deriving all their income from music and musicians from Global Majority backgrounds, while almost half of Global Majority respondents reported experiencing racism. Half reported a lack of sustainable income as a barrier and 35 per cent said they could not support themselves or their families through being a musician. LGBTQ+ musicians also reported higher levels of financial difficulty and discrimination, including an income gap of around £4,000 compared with non-LGBTQ+ musicians in the Census sample.
It would therefore be difficult to argue convincingly that funding should simply ignore demographic inequalities and treat everybody identically. Equality of treatment and equality of opportunity are not necessarily the same thing. If particular groups have faced demonstrable barriers to entering or progressing within the music industry, there is a legitimate argument for interventions designed to address them.
Where I think the conversation becomes more difficult, and more interesting, is in understanding how funding systems recognise the circumstances of individuals alongside the wider inequalities they are designed to address. Demographic categories serve important purposes, particularly when identifying patterns of exclusion and establishing the objectives of targeted programmes. But they cannot necessarily capture the full complexity of somebody's economic and social circumstances. The question is whether our approaches to funding are sufficiently equipped to recognise both.
Socioeconomic disadvantage is also structural. Research by the Creative Industries Policy and Evidence Centre has repeatedly identified substantial class inequalities across the creative industries. Its analysis found that just 16 per cent of people working in creative occupations came from working-class backgrounds, compared with almost a third across the wider UK workforce, while people from privileged backgrounds were more than twice as likely to secure creative work. The research also emphasises that class interacts with ethnicity, gender, disability and education, potentially compounding disadvantage rather than existing separately from it.
More recent PEC analysis illustrates the geographical dimension particularly starkly. Outside London and the South East, only around 5 per cent of people from working-class origins work in a creative occupation, compared with 15 per cent of those from privileged backgrounds. The same research stresses that class inequalities intersect with racial, gender, disability and spatial inequalities. This matters because socioeconomic disadvantage is not always as visible within discussions about diversity, particularly when family income, the circumstances of somebody's upbringing, access to professional networks and cultural capital are not fully captured by existing measures.
A serious approach to equity should be capable of recognising all of these things at the same time. Consider two musicians from similarly low-income households. One may also belong to an ethnic group that experiences documented racial inequality within the industry, while the other may not. It would be unreasonable to pretend their experiences must therefore be identical. Equally, belonging to an underrepresented demographic does not automatically tell us somebody's household income, educational opportunities, family connections or access to professional networks. People contain more than one characteristic, and disadvantage rarely arrives neatly packaged in a single category.
This is where I think socioeconomic need deserves greater attention. If somebody cannot afford an instrument, rehearsal space or a train fare to a gig, that is a material barrier regardless of their ethnicity, gender, sexuality or the genre of music they make. That doesn't mean their experiences are otherwise equivalent, or that financial disadvantage somehow cancels out discrimination. It means that poverty is itself a significant obstacle to participation, one that can affect musicians across demographic groups and compound other forms of disadvantage.
If that same person simultaneously experiences another form of structural disadvantage, a sophisticated funding system should be capable of recognising that as well. Equity should enable us to see more of an individual's circumstances rather than reducing them to whichever characteristic happens to fit most easily into an application form.
There is a reasonable counterargument here. If funding bodies were to concentrate heavily on financial need, could that inadvertently reproduce other inequalities? A musician from a low-income background who has never personally encountered racial discrimination may be economically disadvantaged, but that does not mean another musician with a similar income has faced exactly the same barriers. Nor does somebody need to be experiencing financial hardship for discrimination to restrict their opportunities. This is precisely why I don't think socioeconomic status should simply replace other considerations. The challenge is to construct funding mechanisms capable of recognising intersecting forms of disadvantage without assuming that any single characteristic provides a complete picture of need.
Arts Council England's approach is instructive. Its National Lottery Project Grants guidance explicitly states that decision making considers people and organisations underrepresented among recipients and beneficiaries and may prioritise applications that address this. Its published guidance identifies Black, Asian and ethnically diverse people and disabled people as underrepresented in its funding, alongside geographical areas receiving lower levels of investment.
There is a clear equity rationale behind that approach. It also demonstrates that funding decisions involve more than an isolated judgement about the artistic merits of one project. Wider questions about the distribution of public investment can legitimately form part of the decision, and artistic quality and equitable distribution need not be competing objectives. The interesting question is how those different considerations are balanced, and how clearly that balance is communicated to applicants.
PRS Foundation provides another useful example of how different objectives coexist. Its Open Fund supports music creators across genres and backgrounds and generally expects applicants to demonstrate a track record of more than 18 months. It offers grants of up to £5,000 but does not cover 100 per cent of project costs, meaning applicants need to identify other sources of income. PRS Foundation also operates Women Make Music, which is specifically available to women, trans and non-binary music creators.
There is nothing inherently contradictory about running both broadly accessible and targeted programmes, provided their objectives are clear. A programme designed to address a particular inequality may reasonably have specific eligibility requirements. That is different from a programme open to a wider range of applicants which then considers individual circumstances as part of its assessment. Both approaches have a place, although they are trying to achieve different things.
The difficulty for emerging musicians is often reaching the point at which they can make a competitive application at all. PRS Foundation says that only around 10 per cent of Open Fund applications are successful. Its guidance also makes clear that track record matters and that confirmed professional activity can strengthen an application. These requirements are understandable. With demand greatly exceeding available resources, funders need evidence that an applicant is serious and that an investment is likely to make a difference.
Yet they create an interesting problem at the very beginning of an artist's career. If somebody lacks the financial resources to record, rehearse, travel, perform and release music, it may be considerably harder for them to build the track record that makes them competitive for funding. A requirement intended to identify artists who are ready to benefit from investment can also present a challenge for those who need investment in order to reach that point.
There is another form of inequality here which receives less attention: knowing how to ask for money.
Funding applications have their own language and conventions. Applicants learn to talk about professional development, audience reach, outcomes, budgets, impact and project rationale. Somebody studying music in higher education, working with a manager or receiving experienced mentoring may understand how to translate a creative idea into that language. An equally talented musician without those networks may not even know which funding opportunities exist.
This matters because access to funding cannot be measured solely by whether somebody is technically eligible to complete an application form. Knowing how institutions work, understanding the terminology they use and knowing how to present yourself to them are forms of cultural capital. The creative industries research showing the persistent advantage enjoyed by people from more privileged backgrounds suggests that this wider context cannot simply be separated from questions of access.
There is also an unavoidable question about who makes these decisions. Funding criteria inevitably contain concepts such as quality, potential, impact and career development. They sound relatively objective until somebody has to decide what they mean. PRS Foundation, for example, says that for most schemes the music itself accounts for 50 per cent of the adviser score, while advisers are also asked to consider proposed activity within the context of the genre in which an applicant works.
This seems sensible because evidence of progress for an electronic producer may look very different from evidence for an indie band, composer, jazz musician or songwriter. Nevertheless, judgement remains involved, which makes the range of professional and cultural experience represented in assessment processes important.
Who sits on assessment panels? What professional backgrounds do they come from? How familiar are they with the different routes through which musicians develop their careers? How are potential conflicts of interest managed, and how much do applicants understand about the process? These are reasonable questions for any organisation distributing limited resources, particularly where decisions inevitably involve a degree of subjective judgement.
There is also a question about what the available data tells us. It would be useful to understand more about the socioeconomic backgrounds of successful applicants across different funding programmes, and how those outcomes compare with the wider population of musicians. We have evidence of class inequality within the creative industries, but that does not automatically tell us how individual funding programmes perform in addressing it. Without that information, it is difficult to know whether socioeconomic disadvantage is being adequately recognised or where improvements might be needed.
None of this means that funding bodies are doing something wrong simply because they make choices between applicants. Scarcity makes those choices unavoidable. If only around one in ten applications to a programme is successful, many worthwhile projects will inevitably go unfunded. The more important issue is whether applicants understand what a fund is trying to achieve and the basis upon which those difficult choices are being made.
This is also where the language of equality and equity needs careful handling. A completely equal system might offer everybody the same opportunity and apply exactly the same criteria. An equitable system recognises that people do not necessarily arrive at the starting line with the same resources or after encountering the same obstacles. I find the principle of equity persuasive. My concern would arise only if the pursuit of equity became too blunt, so that assumptions about an individual's circumstances were made primarily from membership of a broad group while other significant disadvantages were overlooked.
Could that produce unfair outcomes? Of course it could, just as a supposedly neutral system can produce unfair outcomes when it ignores longstanding structural barriers. No funding model designed and administered by people is immune from bias or unintended consequences. The answer is not to abandon equity, but to make it more sophisticated and transparent. A system designed to recognise disadvantage should be capable of recognising poverty and class alongside race, disability, gender, geography and other relevant barriers, including the ways in which those factors overlap.
I began thinking about this because I wondered whether young musicians making indie and guitar music might sometimes fall between the gaps. I still think that is a reasonable question, particularly if the historic commercial success of a genre creates an impression that it already possesses a functioning infrastructure capable of supporting the next generation. But the more I considered it, the more I felt that genre was probably the wrong place to start.
Rather than assuming we understand an artist's circumstances because of the kind of music they make or the demographic category into which they fall, we could ask what resources they actually have, where they live, what participation in their form of music costs, what networks they can access, which barriers are preventing them progressing and what difference a particular amount of investment would make.
I don't think there needs to be one answer to what music funding is for. There is a legitimate case for programmes specifically intended to correct historic underrepresentation, just as there is a legitimate case for funding based on financial need, artistic experimentation, regional development or the potential to build sustainable careers. Different funds can and probably should do different things. What matters is being explicit about the problem each fund is designed to address, how competing factors are weighted and how success will be measured.
For those of us working in artist development, there is another group worth considering as well: the musicians who never apply. They may not know funding exists, may assume it isn't intended for people like them, may not understand the process or may lack the professional vocabulary to describe what they are doing in the way an application expects. They do not appear in statistics about unsuccessful applicants because they never entered the system.
That may ultimately be the most important reason to keep examining how music funding works. A fair funding landscape isn't necessarily one in which every programme treats every musician identically, nor is it one in which we attempt to compensate for every inequality through the same funding pot. It is one that is clear about what it is trying to achieve, recognises that disadvantage can take several forms and remains willing to examine who is benefiting, who isn't and why.
If we are serious about creating a music industry in which talent can emerge from a genuinely broad range of backgrounds, socioeconomic circumstances have to be part of that conversation. Not instead of race, gender, disability or other forms of inequality, but alongside them. The challenge is not deciding which form of disadvantage matters most. It is building a funding system sufficiently nuanced to recognise that opportunity in music is shaped by all of them.
