Youth Music is a charitable funder. This means that we give grants to other organisations - small charities, arts venues, music businesses, youth clubs, music education hubs, housing associations, nurseries and more - to run music making projects or create career progression opportunities in music.
Youth Music funding is made available through a grants applications process, with several funding rounds each year.
Youth Music is supported by the National Lottery via Arts Council England. This enables us to invest in projects all over England. Thanks to additional funding from players of People's Postcode Lottery, we've been able to launch our Incubator Fund to support young people and music businesses, and extend our funding to include Wales and Scotland.
Our funds
Youth Music Trailblazer Fund
Grants of between £2,000 and £30,000 for organisations that want to support children and young people facing barriers to make, learn and earn in music, through innovative projects that test, trial, or break the status quo.
Learn more about the Trailblazer Fund.
Youth Music Catalyser Fund
Grants of between £30,001 and £300,000 for established organisations that want to support children and young people facing barriers to make, learn and earn in music through sustaining or scaling up their work or changing sector practice.
Learn more about the Catalyser Fund.
Youth Music NextGen Fund
The Youth Music NextGen Fund offers young creatives grants of up to £2,500 to make their ideas happen. We’ve launched the NextGen Fund to help emerging musicians and behind the scenes creatives take a step forward in participating and changing the music industries.
Learn more about the NextGen Fund.
Access Support
We want to ensure our activities are open and accessible to all. We are committed to meeting people’s access needs so that they can engage with our funding and activities.
Application Access Fund
If you identify as Disabled and need further support to make an application to Youth Music, you can apply to our Application Access Fund. This provides funding to cover any additional access costs that might be required for you to make an application to one of Youth Music’s main grant funds. You should apply for this fund before you start making your application.
Click here for more information on the Application Access Fund.
Personal Access Costs
When you make an application to Youth Music, you can build in personal access costs to your budget. These are costs that remove barriers to enable staff to deliver the project and undertake the grant reporting. Designed for those facing the following additional barriers:
- d/Deaf or disabled.
- Neurodivergent.
- Have learning difficulties.
- Have a mental health condition.
- Have a long-term health condition.
You can apply for personal access costs in addition to the maximum grant amount, up to a maximum of 10%. Download the personal access costs guidance for further information.
Click here to download Access support guidance for applicants and funded partners
Other access support we can provide
If there are barriers to engaging with our materials (e.g. documents, forms, websites, online grants portal) then please let us know. We can supply them in a different format or find an alternative way for you to engage.
We can often be flexible about application and reporting deadlines if you have access needs and contact us at least two weeks before a deadline.
If you are attending any of our events, we will ask about your access needs as part of our booking process. If we’ve asked you to perform or present at an event that we have organised, we encourage you to send us your access rider.
Latest Funding Round Deadlines
All deadlines are 5pm.
Trailblazer Fund
Trailblazer Round 8
Deadline: 22 November 2024
Notification: 21 March 2025
For projects starting between: April and June 2025
Trailblazer Round 9
Deadline: 11 April 2025
Notification: 8 August 2025
For projects starting between: September and November 2025
Catalyser Fund
The Catalyser Fund consists of two stages. If your Expression of Interest is successful you will be invited to complete a full application.
Catalyser Fund Round 5
Expression of Interest Deadline: 2 May 2025
Notification: 20 June 2025
Full Application Deadline: 01 August 2025
Notification: 24 October 2025
For programmes starting between: December 2025 and February 2026
NextGen Fund
NextGen Fund Round 11
Deadline: 7 February 2025
Notification: May 2025
Partner funding
Talent Development Partners fund
Youth Music is a co-funder in 2020-21 of PRS Foundation’s Talent Development Partner network. This brings together 49 organisations supporting thousands of exciting, diverse music creators across all genres and regions of the UK. Youth Music co-funds 12 of these organisations to expand their offers specifically focusing on young music creators aged 18 to 25 and breaking down barriers to access and progression.
Closed funds
Youth Music Energiser Fund
Grants of up to £120k for organisations experienced working with early years children. The Energiser Fund aims to celebrate and energise creative practice with 2-4-year-olds. Centring children’s voices, views and lived experience, the fund will explore co-design and participation in creative projects for early years.
Learn more about the Energiser Fund.
Youth Music Recharge Fund
The Youth Music Recharge Fund offers grants of up to £90k (max £30k per year) to boost organisations in their post-Covid recovery. Learn more about the Recharge Fund. Learn more about the Recharge Fund.
Emergency Fund
The Emergency Fund offered grants available of up to £10,000 for music-making organisations who were in immediate need due to the Coronavirus pandemic. You can find out more about our findings as a result of running this fund in this article written by Research and Evaluation Officer Remi Fairweather Stride.
Fund C
Fund C awarded larger grants of up to £160,000 per year for projects with a dual role of delivery and strategic work; expanding and embedding high quality, inclusive music-making. The programme will run to March 2021, we won't be launching another Fund C programme after this date - read more in our latest grant changes blog.