AUTOR – Work Grants (Arbejdslegat)

Autor awards between 300 and 500 of these every year, drawing on Koda's cultural funds, and their whole purpose is to buy composers and songwriters uninterrupted time to write. The scope is narrow on purpose. The grant covers the creative phase and nothing else: it will not pay for recording, physical releases, PR, travel, courses, instrument purchases, commissioned work or fees to collaborators. Other Koda Kultur pools handle those stages.

Any Koda member can apply. Membership of Autor itself is not required, and you cannot apply for someone else. The grants are personal, paid to the applicant's Danish NemKonto and taxed accordingly. You name the amount you want rather than submitting a budget — from around DKK 6,000 where several composers in a band apply separately, up to DKK 40,000 for substantial projects, with one grant per applicant per year. You may run an application to the Potential Pool alongside this one, but not to the Danish Composers' Society work grants.

Applications go through Koda's system using MitID: about 2,000 characters of text, a short CV, three MP3s with credits, and your reasoning for choosing them.

Autor is unusually candid about how it decides. The committee spends roughly eight minutes per application — five reading, three voting. Its published advice follows from that: say what you are asking for in the opening lines, attach at least one demo of the work to come rather than only past releases, and show where the music is heading. Answers arrive around two and a half months later, with no individual feedback on rejections.