Music Patron is an exciting, fascinating and even provocative new arts-funding initiative. It not only examines and challenges the ways we can, and do, support musicians, but offers a solution that aims to achieve practical, positive outcomes in the face of ongoing financial and ideological attacks on the industry.

The name itself deliberately conjures up two types of support: the crowdfunding model (sites like Patreon and Kickstarter, or in the publishing world, Unbound) where the fanbase gathers to pledge money towards the creator’s latest project; and patronage in its historic sense, where a wealthy individual or entity would maintain an artist’s livelihood longer term.

Music Patron contends that these two approaches are compatible rather than contradictory. In the process, it stands to liberate the spirit and concept of patronage from any idea that it is outmoded or linked to privilege, and reinvigorate it for the future.

The scheme focuses primarily on composers. Many of these are also active as performing musicians: as one would expect, most people who can write music have an instrument; but performing, recording or releasing their own work is often a necessity simply to get it heard. But composition comes first: it is at the heart of Music Patron’s drive to ensure new music can still be made.

The model, then, in brief:

• Composers sign up to the scheme, providing their biography and relevant details.
• Supporters arrange to give money as they see fit. There is a great deal of flexibility here.
• The ‘standard’ approach – the idea in its purest form, as it were – is to choose a composer whose work and practice align with your interests and commit to making them a regular payment (£10 a month or more).
• If you’re not sure which composer to support, you can take a quiz and Music Patron will suggest a good ‘match’.
• However, you are free to support more than one composer, or make irregular, stand-alone donations.
• Or if you want to help but prefer not to fund specific individuals, you can make general payments to Music Patron. These donations go towards its running costs (alongside income from Gift Aid, and special donations for the purpose).

So, one of the key innovations for me is the absence of specific projects. Think about getting any arts endeavour off the ground these days. One traditional method is commission – where the creator relies on a sponsor with the desire and financial back-up to realise a vision they ‘share’ in some way. But even the modern, no-frills crowdfunding approach usually involves pitching the idea to generate the widest support possible. Either way, the artist has to ‘win’ the right to create paid work over and over again, generating a huge amount of stress and effort just to gain the supposed validation to begin the project in earnest.

For me, this is the most imaginative leap Music Patron have taken: the idea that a composer’s supporters are not simply pre-paying for something they have been pre-sold. Instead, they demonstrate they are happy to provide funds at the creative stage; to demonstrate faith in the artists that they will continue to produce work they are interested in, and give them the freedom to do that without the constraints and expectations that come with a project-based crowdfunding system.

Of course, this approach has a greater element of goodwill. Music Patron openly acknowledges in its declared aim to ‘democratise philanthropy’. A key danger of old-school patronage is its fragility: the reliance on a single person or body whose interests, priorities or indeed financial prosperity could change at any time. The scheme steadies this instability by turning one ‘patron’ into many, a committed, like-minded collective: the affordable amounts contributed by everyone add up to a significant whole.

But the philanthropic aspect is still crucial. Music Patron retains the engagement element of crowdfunding through its direct communication channel between artists and supporters, allowing the composers to keep backers informed, even involved, as new works come to life, and reveal as much of their creative processes as they’re comfortable with.

To give a real-world example, cellist-composer Jo Quail (whose work I’ve written about before) has joined the scheme. Quail’s own music has always combined elements of classical, rock and electronica, her signature sound arising from pieces for electric cello and loop station: live, she transforms into a one-woman orchestra as she weaves the complex layers of sound together. In this mode she happily appears on metal bills as readily as classical stages. However, with every album (records which, until relatively recently, she has had to self-release), she aims higher: longer, more intricate pieces, more complex arrangements, a constant quest to capture the vast scope of the sounds she can hear in her head. But expansive means expensive: it’s free to have ambitions – realising them is something else.

However, in recent years (cradling the pandemic), the metal music festival Roadburn commissioned Quail to write and present a new work focusing on the overlap between classical and ‘heavy’ music – a task she was made for. The result, ‘The Cartographer’, is a spectacular album-length achievement featuring around 15 musicians (including a small army of trombonists alongside cello, violin, piano, percussion and vocals), successful enough to enjoy a second life on CD and vinyl, documenting a major milestone in Quail’s development.

But we have ‘The Cartographer’ in its ultimate, permanent format because of that commission. Of course, Quail composes all the time, and will no doubt do so all her life. Some of the same themes, concepts and even the magnetic attraction to trombones may all have emerged anyway, at some time or other. But the piece as we know it grew from something essentially precarious and random: an organisation providing the temporary security to justify spending that time on that idea. Now, of course, Roadburn commissions other people to create works for the festival and the burden is on Quail to ‘win’ a new commission from elsewhere.

Imagine if she could be financially supported to create works on this scale during the moments of inspiration and toil of development: the safety net in operation throughout, so the pieces can be written and then taken up by musical groups or orchestras, whether Quail chooses to record them herself or not. It would be transformative.

The endgame is to empower these composers to do what is almost impossible in today’s financial, artistic and political climate: get somewhere close to earning a living from their music. To start generating and receiving income during the creative phase of the project – not just in retrospect – and then have the freedom to use and share that work in the way that suits them best.

The statistics cited by Music Patron offer some valuable perspective. If you sign up to Spotify, you pay just under £10 a month and every time you stream a song it generates almost a third of a penny. At that rate, an artist needs half a million streams a month to make minimum wage. If you sign up to Music Patron, you pay £10 a month, and your chosen composer gets all of it.

If you are kindly reading this article, you have made it to the ArtMuseLondon site (hopefully one of many visits), and I can assume you are a supporter – and consumer – of the arts. From the collapse of musicians’ livelihoods to what feels like the deliberate vandalism wrought on many of our musical institutions, the current situation can leave many of us wondering what, if anything we can do. Solve the entire crisis? No. But this is something we can do. And the more of us do it, the bigger a difference it actually makes: Music Patron will be able to pass more money to more composers, at a sustainable level.

Here is an opportunity to be part of a change you want to see. Please take it, if you can.

AA

Find the Music Patron website here.

Thank you to Sonia Stevenson and Dennis Chang of Music Patron for providing valuable source information for this piece. Featured imagery from the Music Patron site.

As well as supporting their work on Music Patron if you choose, you can also use Bandcamp to hear – and buy – music directly from Jo Quail and Stuart MacRae.