Last edition I asked who owns the airwaves. This one is about who gets the money. And not just any money: Our public money.
On 29 September, the Musikvielfalt-Initiative published a never-before-seen comparison of public music funding in the six biggest Swiss cities for the year 2024. The method is documented, the individual grants are listed, and the result is uncomfortable: CHF 271.7 million went into music across the six cities, and 88.6% of it went to classical. Pop, rock, jazz, hip-hop, electronic music—the entire contemporary bucket—got 9.1%.
That’s the number people will quote. The more consequential one is the second: 90.9% of that money is committed for multiple years to the same recipients. Only a tenth of public music funding in these cities is flexible, the kind a freelance musician or a small promoter can actually apply for.
Which reframes the whole debate: This was never about taste, or about which genre deserves better. It’s about what public money is structurally capable of paying for. And what it’s capable of paying for, overwhelmingly, is buildings and the salaried people inside them. And it also tells a story of political unwillingness to change.
While municipalities fail to provide anything worth calling equality, Switzerland is becoming an afterthought. At least in the eyes of the major labels. Universal and Sony both centralised power now in Berlin. GSA stands for Germany settles anything.-
Headlines
The money follows buildings
The Musikvielfalt-Initiative, backed by the IG Musik, examined municipal and cantonal funding, plus lottery money, flowing into each city’s music scene: venues, events, institutions, and independent projects.
Per capita, the range is enormous: Geneva spends CHF 374.80 per resident on music, Lugano CHF 98.90. Zurich spends CHF 235.80, Lausanne CHF 200.90, Bern CHF 178.70, Basel CHF 143.70. (Full PDF)
- Why it matters: In all six cities, classical takes between 76% and 95% of the music budget. Zurich is—unsurprisingly—the extreme at 94.8%: CHF 100.3 million of CHF 105.8 million.
Per capita spending on contemporary music (named musiques actuelles in the study), by contrast: Geneva CHF 43.50, Lausanne 29.20, Basel 20.50, Bern 20.40, Zurich 10.20, Lugano 2.60. Geneva spends 4.3 times more per resident on pop, rock and jazz than Zurich does. The Röstigraben in music funding is real, and it’s starker than most people assume. - The structural reason: This is not a conspiracy, and the study is careful to say so. Orchestras, opera houses and concert halls carry fixed costs, from salaried ensembles and buildings to multi-year contracts. And those costs land in the budget before anyone writes a grant guideline. Classical institutions were long treated as the only serious players in urban musical life, and to some extent, this notion persists. But most importantly, the funding architecture built then is still standing. It is also load-bearing: you cannot simply take a third of it away without closing something.
- The flexible-money trap: In every city, within contemporary music, bound and flexible funding are roughly equal. Which means essentially: all the flexible money in the system is the free-scene money. Zurich’s entire flexible pot for pop, rock, jazz and hip-hop is CHF 2.5 million. Across all six cities, and all genres, 9.1 per cent of public music money is discretionary. For a sector Swiss cultural policy keeps describing as the future, that is a shamefully thin layer of oxygen.
- Lugano’s lottery dependency: The most extreme case. Lugano’s tax-funded contribution to contemporary music is CHF 6,000 a year, a mere 0.1 per cent of its music budget. Another CHF 173,000 comes from lottery money.
Overall, 61.1 per cent of Lugano’s music funding comes from the lottery, compared with 30.9 per cent from tax revenue. Legally, lottery funds may not replace what the public sector is required to fund as a matter of course. A city where the majority of music funding comes through gambling proceeds is not a stable arrangement for anyone depending on it. - Critical thoughts: The IG Musik’s proposed fix—at least one third of the music budget for independent music creation—has already been put to the ballot in Basel-Stadt. Voters rejected it in November 2024 with 64% no. SONART’s response sensibly refuses the framing the numbers invite: this is not classical against pop. However, it kind of still is. The likelihood of doubling music funding without taking away from anyone, and instead creating more equality, is basically zero.
- And yet: Zurich shows what improvement could look like. The city added CHF 300,000 to its free credit to require a minimum of CHF 500 per performing musician per concert in its Live-Beitrag, and raised the maximum tour contribution to CHF 20,000—explicitly to keep pace with the SONART fee recommendations. Since 2026, the city also runs three new resource-independent instruments, including a Flex-Beitrag and a Kulturraumbeitrag.