Music commissioners consider how to steer more grants toward working musicians

The city’s Music Commission may consider a proposal from a local advocacy group to designate a specific portion of grants from a new city grant program to be awarded to working musicians, who are increasingly finding it harder to afford living in Austin.

At Monday’s meeting, the commission heard a presentation from representatives from Austin Texas Musicians, which works for musician-friendly policy at the local and state level. The presentation suggested allocating half of the award pool for the Live Music Fund toward performances booked through local venues, with the goal of paying more local musicians the city’s $200 per player standard.

That possible split is one of the steps city staff and City Council could consider next year in making adjustments to the Live Music Fund, which had its first cohort of recipients this year for $2.5 million in grants split in $5,000 and $10,000 allotments.

Austin Texas Musicians, which has 5,000 members, conducted a survey of applicants for the first round of grants, with many respondents saying they felt the program was aimed more at promoters and event producers rather than working musicians. The Live Music Fund and a trio of recently restructured cultural arts grant programs have come under scrutiny in recent months over delays in payment, poor communication with recipients or the scoring process for applicants.

“Are we paying for the current model, which is to fund these big event performances and productions? Or are we looking at the need in our community with musicians who tell us we really just need to be paid more to play at music venues?” said Pat Buchta, CEO of Austin Texas Musicians. “As long as the money winds up in the musicians’ pockets, that’s all we care about. … Ideally, the Live Music Fund would then kick in to subsidize that performance cost and get every band member up to the current city standard pay rate of $200 per musician.”

Leaders within the Economic Development Department, which contains the Music and Entertainment Division, have pledged to make improvements to the four grant programs, which this year accounted for $15 million funded by the city’s portion of Hotel Occupancy Tax revenue. Another change in store for the Live Music Fund’s next iteration is the inclusion of music venues as potential grant recipients, with the award pool increased to account for the additional applications.

Representatives from the Red River Cultural District and the city’s chapter of the Music Venue Alliance are currently preparing proposals for how venues could take part in the grant program. Buchta told the Austin Monitor his group will likely partner with those organizations early next year to ask Council for its support in their proposals.

The commission took no action on the item, though members appeared supportive of the idea of making the Live Music Fund easier for applicants and more impactful for working musicians.

Chair Nagavalli Medicharla suggested the possibility of tiered grants to provide funding for newer, emerging artists and larger awards for event producers featuring more established Austin musicians.

“I really do like the idea of kind of a major rethink while still preserving the core principles of what we wanted to do with these funds,” she said. “It could be category-based, such as that for recording projects and for videos and for live performances, and just ways to just simplify it where applying is not so tedious.”

The commission also received an update on the status of grant payments from Bobby Garza, chief program officer for the Long Center for the Performing Arts, which is administering much of the grant process for the city. Garza said as of Monday, 347 of the 368 awardees had been sent their grant agreements. Of those, payments totaling $1.5 million had been sent to 319 awardees.

Photo by Michael Barera, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

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