Music funding in Ontario

Ontario mirrors the industry/artist split found across the country, with two funders that are deliberately complementary rather than overlapping.

Ontario Creates: funding music companies

Ontario Creates, through its Ontario Music Office, runs the Ontario Music Investment Fund as an economic-development fund for music companies. It is organized into five streams segmented by company type and revenue band — record labels, publishers, managers, live music presenters, and trade associations — with a dedicated stream for smaller high-growth companies. If you are an individual artist without a registered music business, this fund is not aimed at you; if you run a label or management company, it is the centre of the provincial map.

Ontario Arts Council: funding artists

The Ontario Arts Council grants directly to individual professional artists, groups, and collectives, and its music program suite is unusually granular for an arts council: separate programs exist for creation (songwriting and commissioning) and recording, alongside streams for production, touring, and francophone music projects. It welcomes all genres and career stages — and it explicitly excludes record labels, the exact applicant type the Ontario Music Investment Fund exists to serve. The two funders fit together rather than competing.

The association gap

MusicOntario, the province's music industry association, is not currently listed here: its website was unreachable when this page was verified, so its programs could not be confirmed at source. Industry-association services in Ontario are otherwise provided nationally through CIMA.

Applying

Artists start at the Ontario Arts Council (creation and recording streams, by project type); companies start at Ontario Creates and pick the stream matching their business type and revenue; and both can stack federal money — FACTOR in particular — on top.