Funding Competition: Creative Catalyst – AI in the Music Industry (UK)

This funding is part of Innovate UK’s Creative Catalyst. The aim of this competition is to advance the development of Artificial Intelligence products and services within the global music supply chain which benefit and strengthen the UK Music Sector.

They are interested in proposals across the whole music industry including live, recorded and publishing. Collaborators can be international but organisations outside of the UK cannot be funded.

Your project must:

• support the growth of the UK music industry
• utilise artificial intelligence or enable the use of AI
• demonstrate a clearly innovative and ambitious idea
• respond to the changing market conditions and challenges in the global music industry
• be market ready within 12 months of receiving support
• demonstrate value for money

They encourage applications which partner with organisations within the traditional music industry supply chain, for example, music labels and music venues.

Specific Themes

• Your project can focus on one or more of the following:
  • assistive generative AI as a collaborative creator tool to benefit the value chain
  • opportunities to improve meta data for discovery, for example, deep learning, enabling collaborations across rights holders, music publishers
  • data integrity for machine learning where data is robust, reliable, and accessible to benefit and address the needs across the ecosystem
  • transparent AI algorithm development with a focus on bias reduction, ethical approaches to content generation and fairness
  • harnessing AI for artist-first creativity and new forms of licensing and artist or fan creativity
  • meaningful fan engagement and new channels of artist or fan communication and monetisation, incorporating AI with other technologies, such as Web3, Gaming, and Metaverse
• This is not an exhaustive list. Other innovations utilising AI which can address the fundamental issues the industry needs resolving are welcome.

Funding Information

• Your project’s total costs must be between £100,000 and £250,000.

Projects they will not fund

• They are not funding projects that:
  • are not collaborative
  • do not utilise or enable AI
  • do not economically benefit the UK’s music industry
  • focus on sectors and challenges outside of the music industry
• They cannot fund projects that are:
  • dependent on export performance, for example giving a subsidy to a baker on the condition that it exports a certain quantity of bread to another country
  • dependent on domestic inputs usage, for example giving a subsidy to a baker on the condition that it uses 50% UK flour in their product

Eligibility Criteria

• Your project
  • Your project must:
    • last between 6 and 12 months
    • carry out all of its project work in the UK
    • intend to exploit the results in the UK
    • start by 1 April 2024
    • end by 31 March 2025
  • Projects must always start on the first of the month and this must be stated within your application. Your project start date will be reflected in your grant offer letter if you are successful.
  • Under current restrictions, this competition will not fund any procurement, commercial, business development or supply chain activity with any Russian or Belarusian entity as lead, partner or subcontractor. This includes any goods or services originating from a Russian or Belarusian source.
• Lead organisation
  • To lead a project your organisation must:
    • be a UK registered business of any size
    • collaborate with other UK registered organisations
    • be or involve at least one grant claiming micro, small or medium-sized enterprise (SME)
• Project team
  • To collaborate with the lead, your organisation must be one of the following UK registered:
    • business of any size
    • academic institution
    • charity
    • not for profit
    • public sector organisation
    • research and technology organisation (RTO)
  • Each partner organisation must be invited into the Innovation Funding Service (IFS) by the lead to collaborate on a project. Once partners have accepted the invitation, they will be asked to login or to create an account in IFS. They are responsible for entering their own project costs and completing their Project Impact questions in the application.
  • To be an eligible collaboration, the lead and at least one other organisation must apply for funding when entering their costs into the application.
• Non-funded partners
  • Your project can include partners that do not receive any of this competition’s funding, for example non-UK businesses. Their costs will count towards the total project costs.
• Subcontractors
  • Subcontractors are allowed in this competition.
  • Subcontractors can be from anywhere in the UK and you must select them through your usual procurement process.
  • You can use subcontractors from overseas but must make the case in your application as to why you could not use suppliers from the UK.
  • You must provide a detailed rationale, evidence of the potential UK contractors you approached and the reasons why they were unable to work with you. They will not accept a cheaper cost as a sufficient reason to use an overseas subcontractor.
  • All subcontractor costs must be justified and appropriate to the total project costs.
• Number of applications
  • A business can apply as the lead for multiple applications in the competition, but only one successful project will be funded.
  • Any organisation can collaborate in any number of applications.

For more information, visit Innovate UK.