The New Cultural Ambassadors is a good article from the New York Times [may need to register] on the availability of funding for musicians from various countries today and some of the issues such funding raises such as should the government even be funding musicians and what’s it mean for an artist to be taking such money.

The business person in me says if you can’t make money doing it without subsidies then to bad for you. The manager in me is currently working on grant proposals telling the businessman in me to shut it.

[Point of disclosure – From Here To There Records received a grant through the Emerging Music Business Program (link below) administered by the NS Government to start up – I think the businessman forgot about that].

The compromise my two sides reach is that governments should be supporting their cultural identity and the artists that develop such an identity. According to the article Canada has one of the best funding programs in the world, another great reason to be here.

I think any artist that can, whether in some further official capacity or simply via selection to receive funding, act as “appointed emissaries of their homelands” should be thrilled at the chance to do so. Who better to spread the word about Canada’s music scene [and Canada] than musicians.

The whole article is certainly worth reading but a few parts that stood out to me:
“In Canada, which has one of the most established programs, artists can apply for an array of grants or loans to finance up to 75 percent of recording costs, advertising, marketing or touring expenses.

Heather Ostertag, chief executive of Factor, the public-private Canadian agency that oversees music funds, said it controls a budget of roughly $12.4 million and handed out awards to one-third or more of the 3,800 applicants who sought support last year. Broken Social Scene and its label, for example, have been offered more than $140,000, she said.

TO many artists, even to many bands involved in these programs, federal financing may not initially seem very rock ’n’ roll. After the Hives took Sweden’s money, the band’s lead singer, Pelle Almqvist, fumed that tax-financed rock was “like working for the Man.”

Andrew Wilson, the lead singer of the New Zealand art-rock band Die! Die! Die!, whose trips to the United States helped find the band find a manager and a contract with the independent label S.A.F. Records, says he thinks that while the national subsidies may have strengthened New Zealand’s music industry, they have also bred complacency. “Bands are a lot more reliant on grants than they should be,” he said.

Besides FACTOR, Nova Scotia artists can also apply for grants through the NS Department of Tourism, & Culture [Heritage is in there somewhere too] if they are emerging. While exporting or export ready artists can get grants through Music Nova Scotia.

See who’s been approved for FACTOR grants

Article via Coolfer

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