A familiar refrain: Austin’s Live Music Fund sees a surge in demand from struggling musicians

From KUT News:

Sweat beaded down Scott Strickland’s face as he gathered his guitar and amplifier outside Güero’s Taco Bar last Tuesday, the sun creeping through the Austin landmark’s ancient live oaks. He’d been up since 3 a.m. and had just finished his second of three unpaid shows for HAAM Day.

He was tired – not from the set he’d just played. It was something else.

Strickland was one of more than 1,000 people who applied to the city’s Live Music Fund this year. The program offers Austin musicians grants of $15,000 to $30,000 – enough to record or go on tour, maybe hire folks to run a social campaign for an album or EP. As someone who depends on music for most of his income, Strickland was surprised: He didn’t get anything.

“Take my name out of it,” he said. “There’s a lot of really great people that have been doing this longer than I … have, and they didn’t get it. And I’m like, ‘OK, what is going on here?'”

Of the $4.5 million recently awarded, just 137 applicants received grants from the first-of-its-kind program to help keep Austin musicians in Austin. The 1,000 people who applied requested nearly seven times the amount that was ultimately paid out.

And while longtime musicians said they appreciate the program, they think it could be doing more.

Proper venue

The fund was established back in 2019 with the goal of keeping live music in the self-styled Live Music Capital of the World.

It took a couple years to get off the ground, with the first round of city money going out last year in $5,000 and $10,000 grants.

This year, that amount ballooned up to anywhere from $15,000 to $30,000 per recipient, but the number of applicants far outweighed the number of grants awarded. And this year, venues could also apply.

That was a mistake, said Strickland, who is also a member of the city’s Music Commission. The venues, which have a bigger edge in getting private loans, had an unfair advantage.

“If you’re a business, you have access to more loans. You have access to other grants … other avenues,” he said. “When you put venues in the program and you increase the size of the grants, who suffers? The musicians suffer.”

Tameca Jones, a former KUTX Artist of the Month, is one of the musicians Strickland expected to see on the list of recipients.

She’s been gigging for 17 years, playing sold-out shows. As she says, she’s “Austin-famous” not “famous-famous.”

Jones thought about applying to the program last year, but she held off because she knew this year she’d have a new album. She wanted to apply for more money. She figured it was a lock.

“I just knew that I was in there. I just knew it,” she said. “It devastated me, honestly. It devastated me.”

Jones and other musicians were taken aback when they didn’t get any of the money. In her mind, she’d already spent it.

“You know, I was going to a publicist, I was gonna get some new photos. I was going to make some more music and pay the people who helped me make music a fair rate,” she said. “I’m at the poverty line once all my expenses are said and done.”

Sylnovia Holt-Rabb, director of the city’s Economic Development Department, which manages the program, said the record demand didn’t surprise her.

For decades, musicians have struggled to live in Austin. She said the city has provided money to artists since the early ’80s, and there’s always been high demand.

“It’s not a shock,” she said. “But at the end of the day, I’m not sure how you fill $29 million [in applications] and you only have $4.4 million.”

Holt-Rabb said the commission and its working groups agreed to let venues into the program this grant cycle, because they, like musicians, are struggling to stay afloat amid Austin’s affordability crisis. The city’s Music Commission –which Strickland is a member of – decided to OK money for venues this year.

“It was a democratic process,” she said. “Not everyone agreed, but when you walk out of a democratic process, it is the majority.”

Strickland and Jones both also questioned the overall scoring of the grants. The city’s system prioritized applicants without bank accounts and those who live in low-income areas, as well as applicants who hadn’t yet received funding from the city.

Strickland said the state’s anti-DEI law has had a chilling effect on a key goal of the program from its outset: to fund and empower artists from Austin’s historically marginalized communities.

“You can’t talk about race in these applications at all. You can’t bring up … being Black or Latino or any of that stuff any more,” he said. “Because … one of the circuit courts or the Supreme Court or whatever will find that this was ‘racist’ because we’re using DEI or whatever the case may be.”

For Jones, that’s especially gutting. As a Black female artist, like she said, she’s “Austin-famous,” but she hasn’t been able to break out in ways like Black men in Austin’s music scene, including Eric Burton or Gary Clark Jr.

Now, Jones isn’t sure what to do.

“I know it’s hard to be a Black female artist here. I just feel invisible and underfunded and unappreciated,” she said. “I feel like we have to do 10 times the work and be 10 times as talented and still barely, barely get to the ceiling.”

Chapter and verse

First and foremost, Holt-Rabb said, she understands artists’ frustrations. This program is new. It’s not perfect, and the department welcomes feedback to make it more responsive to concerns from struggling artists.

But, Holt-Rabb added, the program only has so much money. It’s funded by a tax on hotel stays in Austin, not the city’s general fund – a billion-dollar pot of money to fund city services.

Pulling more money from that fund is a nonstarter for now, Holt-Rabb said. The city is in a tough spot financially despite passing a record-setting budget in August. It’s got a state-mandated cap on how much it can raise property taxes, along with another legislative mandate to maintain its police budget. And it’s seen a dip in sales taxes.

Holt-Rabb’s solution, at least for now, would be so-called Chapter 380 agreements – deals with private partners to boost funds for the program. Those allow private money to flow into public programs, like the Live Music Fund.

“Government can’t solve 100% of the problem – whether it’s Austin, Nashville and Detroit,” she said. “It just requires public-private partnerships. So that’s what I would encourage and that’s what I keep messaging.”

As a music commissioner, Strickland said he wants artists’ concerns to be addressed in the next grant cycle. He said Austin is the first city to really have a program like this and other cities are looking to the program’s success as a model.

“We want to make sure that we get it right first, so that they can be able to equitably do the same thing,” he said. “And then someone else in New York or Los Angeles or Nashville isn’t having the same conversation with someone else.”

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