WIREDGOV

On World Music Day, Creative Wales has announced £300,000 in funding to help grow and nurture the music industry in Wales.

The second round of Creative Wales’s Music Revenue Fund 2 will open next Monday (24 June). The focus of this round is to help music businesses with: 

• campaigns for new releases
• promoting live music
• producing music for background or incidental use in the media
• Welsh-language music.

Rural label The Road Records were recipients of the previous round of revenue funding. The funding enabled the label to release an EP from Welsh cross-genre folk duo Samana.

Samana / The Road Records are Franklin Mockett and Rebecca Rose who, in 2019, transformed their rural smallholding in Carmarthenshire into an artistic production house and label, whilst running a nature recovery programme in the valley to offer a sanctuary for artistic practice born from the wild.

Franklin said:

Creative Wales’ Revenue Music Fund massively helped us to release the EP ‘Dharma’ in 2023 EP. Since its release, it has gained such global attention that we expanded it into a full length, eponymous album - cited by mojo magazine, record collector and KLOF magazine as an outstanding work, attaining 4/5 reviews and above across the board. 

Our band and label have gathered huge amounts of interest since then and we are hitting the road this month with our sold-out immersive and magical ‘In Tune With The Infinite’ summer tour; an all artist-curated event, played in the round, that we are taking to a small number of unique spaces around the UK.

Minister for Creative Industries, Sarah Murphy, said:

Today is a day to celebrate our thriving music scene. For a small nation we can boast superb venues, festivals, promoters, studios and record labels. Across the globe people listen to Welsh stars – from established acts like the Manic Street Preachers or Funeral for a Friend to up-and-coming grassroots talent like Adwaith and Mace the Great.

I’m committed to making sure talent across the industry – in Welsh and English – is nurtured, supported and developed. So I urge businesses to apply for this funding and build on Wales’ reputation as a great place to make music.

From Monday music businesses will be able to apply for between £20,000 and £40,000 to spend on projects which would benefit from support, due to financial constraints. 

Projects could include live music promotion, release campaigns for new EPs / albums, additional studio time, or session musicians for example.

The funding covers the full spectrum of contemporary popular music genres (electronic, hip-hop, indie and alternative, metal and punk, pop, rock, etc). It doesn’t cover genres with existing support in place such as classical or jazz music.