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Business News Live Business Management & Funding
Music Venue Trust announces new funding scheme for grassroots venues
By Chris Cooke | Published on Wednesday 19 October 2022
The UK’s Music Venue Trust yesterday used its annual Venues Day event to announce a new funding initiative that will provide grants of up to £5000 to grassroots music venues.
The new fund is supported by members of the Music Venues Alliance which sits alongside MVT, and its launch has been funded by donations from ticket sales for shows staged as part of the recent Revive Live programme, presented by MVT in partnership with The National Lottery.
The hope is to find additional support from within the music industry to allow the scheme, called the Pipeline Investment Fund, to continue in the longer term.
The main aim of the initiative is to support small scale projects that enhance grassroots venues, including investments in lights, sound, access and ventilation, plus projects that benefit employees, including training, diversity initiatives and schemes that strengthen local community ties.
MVT CEO Mark Davyd says: “We have been working on music industry based funding support for grassroots music venues since 2018. The launch of the Pipeline Investment Fund is an important indication of how the grassroots sector supports and nurtures each other”.
“It provides a targeted opportunity for individuals, companies and organisations right across the industry to get involved and provide direct and meaningful financial assistance to the venues which support artists to launch and build their careers”, he adds. “We hope that the industry will see this as a real chance to make a genuine difference”.
Davyd also used Venues Day to call on Arts Council England and collecting society PRS For Music to maintain their support of the grassroots music community at previous levels. Arts Council England has announced it will end its specific grassroots live music funding scheme next year, while PRS is planning on cutting the funding it provides to the PRS Foundation.
On those developments, Davyd said yesterday: “This is the wrong time to take money out of the grassroots ecosystem, whether that’s for venues, for artists, or for touring. We strongly urge PRS For Music and Arts Council England to think again. The number of opportunities for new and emerging artists to perform is absolutely vital to the future health of UK live music, and we need to see those opportunities financially supported more than ever before. This is not the time for cuts to funding”.
There is more information about the new funding scheme here.
