The £45 Million Music Plan.

On 13 July 2026 the Culture Secretary launched Turn It Up: Our Plan for Music, a long-term strategy for an industry the government values at £8 billion. Its centrepiece, the Music Growth Package, had been announced the previous year at £30 million. It arrived at £45 million, enlarged by a further £15 million from Arts Council England — which is also the body that will hand most of it out.

Where the money is pointed

The Music Growth Package runs across three strands: grassroots infrastructure, domestic touring and showcasing, and international market expansion. Arts Council England manages the rollout, and the BPI delivers a £4.8 million Music Export Growth Scheme within the total.

The stated widening is that support will reach mid-career artists, band managers, labels and publishers for the first time, rather than only emerging performers. That is a real change of emphasis — most public music funding has historically been aimed at the start of a career, on the assumption that the market takes over afterwards. It frequently does not.

The library studios

At least £12.5 million of dormant assets funding is committed to a Music in Libraries initiative — instrument lending, free studio space, recording booths and performance opportunities in public libraries — co-designed with the Ed Sheeran Foundation.

A further £10 million is identified for creative mentoring for care-experienced children and young people, providing one-to-one relationships with working practitioners.

Both sit alongside the headline figure rather than necessarily inside it, which is worth holding onto when the plan is described as a single sum. Different pots, different rules, different timetables.

What the targets are and are not

More than 2,000 projects and at least 40,000 artists and professionals are delivery targets, not outcomes. They say nothing about average grant size, geographic distribution, or how many recipients will be at any particular career stage.

Divide crudely and the arithmetic is sobering: £45 million spread across three years and 40,000 people is a little over £1,100 each if it were shared out evenly, which it will not be. Growth funding is normally concentrated in fewer, larger awards, so the realistic picture is a modest number of meaningful grants alongside a long tail of small ones.

The word that is missing

The vocabulary of the plan — grassroots venues, touring, exports, showcasing, band managers — describes the commercial popular-music economy. That is a legitimate target for industrial strategy, and it is where the £8 billion figure comes from.

But it means a classical or jazz musician reading this announcement should be clear-eyed about how little of it is designed with them in mind. Orchestras, opera companies, conservatoires and the freelance classical workforce are not the constituency of a growth package built around export markets and grassroots venues. The plan's most directly relevant strand for them is the one in libraries, aimed at children.

How to judge it later

Announcement totals record authorised ambition. Only award data shows who received support and what changed.

A credible evaluation would publish applications and awards, the demographics of applicants, regional allocation, administrative cost as a share of the fund, project survival after the money ends, and export or income outcomes. Those are the figures to ask for in 2027 and 2028 — and their absence, if they are absent, will itself be the finding.