Funding proposal- budgeting

 Whatever your project and whatever the funding route, you will need to prepare a budget. Here is a template (you will need to make a copy of it to be able to edit).

Things to budget for might include:

Rehearsal space hire

Equipment

Session musicians

Physical CD/vinyl manufacture

Merch 

Creation of artwork

Music video

Social media paid ads

Please make sure that you budget using UK examples and think about what you might be able to create yourself - don't forget to pay yourself in this!

If you are applying for Arts funding then you need to make sure that the duns you are looking at offers the amount you need.

If you are doing crowdfunding then you need to set the amount you need as your target.

Some useful links to get you started:

https://www.discmanufacturingservices.com/

https://www.short-run.co.uk/

https://www.awesomemerchandise.com/

Brixton Hill rehearsal rooms

Bush recording studios

The Funding Proposal - which funding route?

Which funding type is most suitable?

ARTS FUNDING
What are your funding?

Does your idea involve another art form or other people?

How much will it cost?
Which funding source is suitable?
How does your project meet their eligibility criteria?
How will funding this project develop your career?
How, if at all, will the project benefit others?


FAN FUNDING
What are you funding?
How long will it take you?
How much will you need?
What will your funders get in return?

Arts Funding

A source of funding is Arts Council England (ACE)



Within the UK, there is (ever diminishing, unfortunately) funding for arts projects of varying sizes. Getting a grant for your project means that you don't need to pay it back but you will need to justify your spending and part fund it some other way be that private finance or other funding bodies.

The Arts Council for England is a major organisation and fund all sorts of things. You can apply directly to them or to one of the more specialist bodies that they fund such as The Wellcome Trust.

General Arts funding is useful for larger scale projects that involve more than one art form, leave some kind of legacy or benefit the community in someway. The money is raised mainly from the National Lottery and distributed by the government.

Next term, you will be taking part in some workshops with artist Serafina Steer, and Dalston music venue, Cafe Oto. These workshops have been made possible because she won some ACE funding to work with the venue to stream some performances and share the process with groups of music students to help them understand how the behind the scenes work to make performances happen works. http://www.serafinasteer.com/bas-jan/

In November, you will be working with Fundamentals who have received Comic Relief funding (via ACE) to deliver mental health and poetry workshops to schools and colleges. These workshops benefit the participants as well as the poets and the music organisation that commissioned the project by way of experience, performance opportunities, learning opportunities and media exposure. The poets get paid to deliver the workshops and the institutions don't have to pay for them. https://werfundamentals.org/fundamentals

When applying, your location can be important. Over the last couple of months, I have been working with a Sheffield based promoter who received ACE funding to produce a series of performances in small venues in Sheffield to bring more established artists there and support local emerging artists. We were scheduled to headline a show with a local act supporting but it was cancelled due to COVID. Details of how they cahnged their project due to COVID can be found here. The filmed gigs will be streamed on October 22nd with live interviews and Q&As. The funding had paid for us to film our sets, edit the films, travel to rehearse etc. 

https://budsandspawn.co.uk/valve-and-persona/

BASSASS GRAMMAR is a dance/music/theatre piece devised by Keir Cooper and Rose Biggins, exploring power, privilege and shame. Keir is based between London and Cornwall and applied for funding from Cornwall. They were awarded funding from The Arts Council to put together the show and have since been touring it, making it more self-sustaining. Keir's other successfully funded projects span interactive theatre, music and other multi-disciplinary practices.


http://www.keircooper.uk/badass-grammar.html

 
 Music specific funding is largely provided by The PRS Foundation and there are many categories so there is usually one that is suitable for your project. You can see videos of case studies here: https://www.youtube.com/user/PRSFMusic/videos

A student who was here a couple of years ago, Tega Mendes, is in the process of applying for Women make Music funding to enable her to write an EP in collaboration with another female producer. She completed her course here and has just finished her degree at ICMP. She has been performing and released a single but is ready to move to the next stage of her career.

   

https://www.instagram.com/tegaamendes/?hl=en

In 2015, former WKC music production student, Little Simz, received the Momentum fund to create and promote her debut album - https://prsfoundation.com/grantees/momentum-little-simz/


   

INDEPENDENT TASK: spend an hour or two looking at the kind of funding that is available and the types of projects that have been funded. Is there anything you might like to do int eh future that would be able to happen if you had funding for it? Would you be able to make it benefit the community? Is there a specific PRS fund that might apply to you? Please note ideas on your blog.

Young people can also get age-specific funding from the prince's Trust for starting up a small business.

Other links:

Business Funding

Youth Music

Sound & Music

MU links

Fenton Arts Trust

Student Funding

Promotion: how to and how NOT to!

When you are promoting a live event, the ultimate aim of this is to get people to come to the event.  In order to do that there are some vital things to ensure you do properly.  There are also things that can go horribly wrong if you get them wrong.

What are you promoting?

• Will the act bring people in?
• Is the venue a suitable size?
• What about location?

How will you fund it?

• Can you get help with advertising through sponsorship?
• Do you need to put a deposit down at the venue?
• Are you offering guarantees to the act or a door split?

Dealing with the band.

• Do you have their tech spec and have to definitely sent it to the engineer?
• Do they require unusually high ceiling clearance?
• What is the line-up and do they know how much space there is on stage?
• Is there somewhere for them to change/store gear?
• Will you be providing them with a rider?
• If there is more than one act, have you arranged sharing of backline with them to minimise changeover times?
• Have you set aside enough time for soundcheck?

Promoting the event.

• Have you crated a facebook event and encouraged the acts to spread the word?
• Local listings?
• Can you print posters/fliers and put them up in the venue before hand?
• Have you planned a marketing strategy? i.e What info will you put out and how often?

A while ago, I did a show that was 'promoted' by possibly the worse promoter in the world.  Disaster from start to finish.  To begin with, he was very communicative by email, so we were quite confident that he was well organised.  When we got there at 4pm to load in however, no one was at the venue and the bar staff didn't seem to know what was going on.  When he finally showed up (6:30pm?) he didn't even introduce himself to us - I figured out that it was him from his photo on facebook and had to go over and make myself known to him.  We waited around for the sound engineer but he wasn't booked to come in until 7pm.  That meant we had to wait for 3 hours.  Also, doors were at 7:30pm.  It is completely impossible to soundcheck 4 bands in half and hour.  The sound engineer hadn't been sent out specs and said he would have come in earlier if he'd been asked to.  When I gave him our channel list he was quite panicked - the venue didn't have enough mics or channels and he'd have been able to get more in if he'd have known in advance! There was also no where for us to store our instruments.  When I asked him about it, he actually asked me to ask at the bar!

After all this faffing about, we were pretty hungry as we'd been up since 5am and had driven a massive 8 hours from Glasgow to Norwich.  The promoter had said he'd order us pizza in but didn't do this until 8pm, by which time, the first band had almost set up and, as the doors were open, we had to eat it outside in the freezing cold because it wasn't bought from the venue.

Everything was running late and there was a curfew of 11pm so we all had to change our sets to make them shorter at the last minute.  The promoter seemed unable to work out timings either. When we finally did get to line check before our set, we couldn't actually fit on the stage properly because he hadn't realised how much space 8 people take up with so many instruments.  Doh!

All of these things were easily avoidable.  Ok, so he was obviously inexperienced but didn't even try to appear like he knew what he was doing.  Shaking hands with him was like someone dangling a limp mackerel at you.  We each made a point of 'bone crushing' him as we said goodbye!

Proof that Norwich is exactly as Alan Partridge portrays it, if ever there was.

INDUSTRY - Publishing

Publishing presentation & class resource 

SENTRIC are a good publishing option if you don't have a deal with a traditional publisher.  they work in a similar way to AWAL (record company, who also deal with publishing to an extent) and specialise in offering sync opportunities.



You can download an article from Sound On Sound here