PPL Momentum Music Fund (PRS Foundation)

Momentum is aimed at the point where an artist stops being promising and starts being viable. Grants of £5,000–£15,000 — the average award is around £10,000 — go towards recording, writing, UK touring and marketing: studio hire, producer, engineer and session-musician fees, travel and accommodation, tour management, PR, radio pluggers, music videos, merchandise. Equipment and software can be included, but only up to 20% of the costs. Van purchase, international touring, capital projects and anything a label or publishing deal should already cover are out.

You need to be a UK-based artist or band writing and performing your own material, with national press and radio coverage, shows played across the UK, evidence of a fanbase, and at least one team member — manager, agent, label, publisher, PR or lawyer. Artists signed to Universal, Sony or Warner, or their subsidiaries, are effectively ruled out. Any of those team members can apply on the artist's behalf, but the grant is made to the artist. Non-performing songwriters and producers are pointed to the Hitmaker Fund, and contemporary classical composers to the Composers' Fund.

Applications go through PRS Foundation's online portal and close at 6pm on the deadline day; there are four rounds a year and decisions land within eight weeks. Independent industry panellists score them. The Foundation is candid that demand outstrips budget, that it will not fund 100% of a project, and that most unsuccessful applications simply failed to show concretely why the money changes the next two years.