City looks to expand budget, recipients for Live Music Fund

The city appears set to increase the number of awards in its Live Music Fund grant program, with specific considerations given to the needs of veteran and emerging artists looking to promote events or create work that could enhance the local tourism economy.

The proposed changes, which are still being evaluated and likely expanded by the Music and Entertainment Division, were presented at last week’s Music Commission meeting, where a vote was also taken to form a working group focused on recommendations for next year’s Live Music Fund.

This year’s cohort of 137 grant awardees from over 1,000 applicants resulted in criticism that the award amounts of $15,000 or $30,000 for individual artists were too large and resulted in too few approved projects.

The 2025 program budget will be increased to $4.8 million to fund 60 emerging artist grants of $5,000 and 175 grants of $20,000 for professional musicians and independent promoters, with the larger awards offered as part of a two-year agreement. There will also be 17 awards of $60,000 given to live music venues, for a total of more than 250 recipients.

The program is funded using a portion of the city’s Hotel Occupancy Tax collections.

Next month, the city will open community feedback to gather more ideas from music economy stakeholders about how to improve the structure of the program to meet the needs of as many musicians, promoters and independent live music venues as possible.

Erica Shamaly, manager of the Music and Entertainment Division, said the scoring system for applicants will also be adjusted to make the process simpler and less time-consuming, with special attention paid to streamlining the submission of supporting documents or “evidence” for some questions. The new applications will also likely award bonuses to applicants with more than 10 years of activity in the local music scene, and do away with questions regarding applicants’ access to health care coverage or banking services because those considerations were seen as too exclusionary.

With the city also committed to providing business coaching to recipients to help them use the grant dollars as effectively as possible, Shamaly said third-party vendors will likely be needed to properly assist the larger pool of awardees.

“We are really doing kind of a very personal one-on-one support system for our grantees, which was the intent around the $30,000 awards, to really work with them over time with the business development training,” she said. “This will be more, by a lot. So we’ll just have to do our very best to be sure that we’re bringing on subcontractors … to provide that level of training.”

Responding to a suggestion that all $20,000 awards be spread out over two years to require recipients to stay in Austin, Shamaly said the city would prefer to make the program as flexible as possible.

She said some artists may need two years and additional training to maximize the grant’s impact, while established artists may require the funds immediately for time-sensitive projects like tours or album production, with a two-year payment schedule hindering their ability to use the grant as a strategic business investment.

Chair Nagavalli Medicharla, who is a working musician, said the proposed program structure is moving in the right direction, with some commissioners suggesting the “emerging” grants could also be put to use for smaller individual projects from longtime musicians.

“I love the split between an emerging artist fund versus a more substantive fund,” she said. “Doing the $20,000, reducing it from the $30,000 … there are definitely folks who can expend the $20,000 very easily and they would know what to do with it and there are also some emerging bands where maybe ($20,000) is just too much to start with and $5,000 is a very substantive dollar amount to do a project with.”

Photo made available through a Creative Commons license.

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