Music funding in Northern Ireland

Northern Ireland's public arts funding runs through the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, and for individual musicians almost all of it sits inside one umbrella: the Support for Individual Artists Programme, usually shortened to SIAP.

SIAP is not a single grant. It is a family of schemes that open and close on their own schedules across the year, funded largely by the National Lottery, covering every artform rather than music specifically. Awards across the programme range from £62 to £15,000 — the low end is small travel and materials money, the high end is substantial project funding. Because the schemes differ so much in size and purpose, that range describes the programme as a whole rather than any one scheme, so check the figure on the scheme you are actually applying to.

The two standing schemes

Creative Progression Scheme funds artistic and career development — the kind of work that moves your practice forward rather than producing a specific finished piece. It runs to an annual deadline, most recently 20 August.

National Lottery Travel Awards is the useful one for touring and international opportunities, and unusually it is a rolling programme with no deadline. If you have been invited to play, showcase or train somewhere and the cost of getting there is the obstacle, this is the scheme to look at, and you can apply whenever the opportunity appears rather than waiting for a round to open.

The rotating opportunities

Alongside those, the Arts Council regularly opens one-off and annual opportunities — bursaries to attend specific international events, funded residencies abroad, and similar. At the time of writing that included bursaries for WOMEX, the world-music expo, which is directly relevant if you work in traditional, folk or global music.

These are deliberately not listed here. They change every year, their pages disappear when they close, and a directory that lists them will be wrong within months. Check the Arts Council's funding pages for individuals directly — that index is the authoritative list of what is open right now.

Worth knowing before you apply

• Applications close at noon, not midnight. Arts Council NI deadlines are 12:00 on the closing day. A submission at 5pm on deadline day is a submission to the next round.
• The travel award has no deadline, so use it when the opportunity is real. Rolling programmes reward applying at the point you have an actual invitation, not at the point you have an ambition.
• SIAP is all-artform. You are not applying to a music fund; you are applying to an arts fund as a musician. Explain your work in terms someone from another discipline can assess.
• Check the scheme's own guidance for its amount. The £62–£15,000 range spans the whole programme, and the scheme you want will have a much narrower band.
• You can apply to Arts Council NI and to the UK-wide funders. PRS Foundation and the others on the United Kingdom page are separate money with separate criteria, and applying to one does not affect the other.