Guidance

This agreement, reached between the Musicians' Union and Making Music in 2017 (updated in 2018, 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024) provides guideline minimum rates for groups when engaging freelance professional musicians. 

We are very pleased to have renewed our agreement with the Musicians’ Union which is now in its seventh year.  

Using good-quality images in your marketing is an effective way to attract attention, drive engagement, and boost ticket sales and membership; however, it’s essential to ensure you have permission to use them to avoid copyright infringement. 

Making an arrangement of a piece of music is fairly common practice among leisure-time music groups, but there are a number of things to consider before you can make one.

Some data

From our Big Survey 2022, we know performing groups commission at least 1430 arrangements each year. 

But we think this might be the tip of the iceberg and there is much more work being done by very skilled professionals.  

The Making Music members’ insurance scheme is run by Finch, specifically for our members. It is offered to those members of Making Music which operate on a voluntary (ie non-professional) basis, for ‘activities associated with the general promotion of music and the performance of musical works’.

What your music group chooses to wear on stage is part of how you present yourself to the world - but care must be taken not to have it become a barrier that might lead to exclusion.

A group's performance wear - their 'uniform' - is the first thing an audience will see, which is why many groups choose to specify what their members wear while performing. This can be a good thing; uniform can bring a sense of belonging to people and help them feel part of a team. If you’re trying to present a unified sound, it can also be effective if you look uniform too.

Recruiting for a new musical leader is an important moment for a music group. This resource will take you through the process from defining the role to making an offer. Groups use different terms for their group's musical leader role, but in this resource we will use Music Director (MD).  

Contents:

In 2023, Paul Whittaker spoke to our members at two events about how groups could support instrumentalists and singers with hearing loss to take part in music-making. This resource covers the good practice suggested by Paul and members that attended those events, for any music-making group working to include deaf people and people with hearing loss in their regular activity.  

Our fifth meeting in our Climate Network series (original event 11 April 2024) discussed the ways in which music groups could come and share their learnings on climate-related music projects.

The speakers for this event were:

In this recording of our webinar (original event 8 March 2024), we talked about the options available to members for sourcing sheet music.

In this recording of our webinar (original event 16 February 2024), we talked about our progress on our #MakeSpaceforMusic campaign, since its launch in Autumn 2023.