After our unavoidably bleak story on Covid-19’s impact on musicians yesterday, here’s some more positive news.
The UK government’s Cultural Recovery Fund has announced its first distribution of funding to stricken companies in the cultural sectors, and the Music Venue Trust, which represents independent music venues, had some very good news from it.
291 grassroots venues applied to the fund, and 251 of them received funding – an 89% success rate. Collectively they secured £41.4m of funding from the two distribution rounds, which is around 12.4% of the total available pot of £334.1m.
This is doubly impressive because, as CEO Mark Davyd told the ‘A Zoom With A View‘ podcast this week: “Less than 2% of our sector had ever received any public funding. We put all the tools in place. We worked with them so that they would really understand it. We brought in a review team to review their applications, we had writers coming to help them. We held webinars… There’s a huge moment here, frankly: are we just changing this fund or are we actually going right, okay, contemporary music is now part of the cultural [funding] landscape in a way it never was before?”
No comments:
Post a Comment