EU's Creative Europe programme gets a €2.2 billion budget

 

By Emmanuel Legrand

Following a trilogue discussion between the European Commission, the Council of Europe and the European Parliament, the budget for the Creative Europe programme has been adopted for 2021-2027. The creative sector will benefit from a European budget of €2.2 billion, some €800m more than what was initially proposed by the Commission. The music sector is likely to be one of the beneficiaries of the increase in budget. The previous budget was of €1.4bn. 

  Sabine Verheyen (pictured, above), the Chair of the European Parliament's Committee on Culture and Education, said it was "a good agreement, a fair, balanced agreement." She added: "What was most important is that we got more money into the programme. It's not as much as the Parliament asked for. We wanted a doubling. [But] it's a raise of nearly 800 million euros and that's a lot of money for the cultural and creative sector." She said the Parliament want to "have the programme more adhesive to the cultural sector and the needs we have explicitly under the Covid-19 crisis."

  The pandemic, she added, has created "a big mess for the [creative] sector. And that's also the reason why the Parliament is, in addition, asking for a share of the recovery fund that has to go to the cultural sector, too. So in addition to the new Creative Europe programme, we also need support by the member states out of the of the recovery fund, which will be managed mainly by the member states in the end."

Boosting Europe's creators

  Themis Christophidou, Director-General for Education, Youth, Sport, Culture, reacted on Twitter to the news: "Just agreed! With a €2.4 billion budget, the new #CreativeEurope will boost Europe's artists, creators and cultural organisations, allowing them to cooperate and co-create across borders like never before."

  Brussels-based indie music company's organisation IMPALA welcomed the agreement on the next Creative Europe programme, with its biggest ever budget, and the fact that the programme will also include specific sectoral actions for music, on top of the traditional horizontal support for the cultural and creative sector. 

A renewed ambition

  "The combination of an increased budget and a new focus on music opens up many opportunities in terms of funding for music projects," said IMPALA’s Executive Chair Helen Smith. "Building on all the work done with Music Moves Europe, which was designed to lay the ground for larger-scale support for the sector under Creative Europe, the EU should be able to show renewed ambition for music and hit the ground running."

  Smith concluded: “We now look forward to hearing what the European Commission has in stock for the music sector. At a time when the music sector is severely impacted by the Covid crisis, but also by recent EU case-law which will have disastrous implications in terms of revenue and basic copyright principles unless addressed, the time is right for the EU to take a strategic and bold approach to its dynamic music sector.”