This post is based on last year's (2024/25) Amplify BC Career Development program guidelines. It assumes that you record your music live with a group of people in a studio, that you're successful in applying, and that you account for and spend the budget properly. I'll assume a six-piece band, meaning five side musicians to hire.
As an "emerging" artist, the program subsidizes 75% of your budget, capped at a maximum award of $10,000, to be spent across the 18 months from April of the current year through November of next year. You'll get an advance of three-quarters of your award ("75% of the 75%") at conservatively 4 months from the application deadline, and then you'll get the remaining funds after filing your completion at some point around summer/fall of next year.
You may earmark $1,500 of the budget to take home yourself in consideration of your own work on the project. I believe the easiest move for us as applicants is to slot in this exact amount as what you expect to receive upon completion, which is to say you don't need any of that cash during production of the project. Therefore you set "25% of the 75%" at $1,500 and come out with a desired award of (1500/0.25 =) $6,000 to go with a budget of $8,000.
Put another way, you spend $8,000 and get a $6,000 subsidy, comprised of $4,500 advanced and $1,500 withheld until completion.
Since $1,500 is both what's withheld til the end as well as what you get to earmark as your own payment, you have the obligation to spend (8000-1500 =) $6,500. And since you get $4,500 of that in your advance, you need (6500-4500 =) $2,000 saved up-front. This matches the (6000-8000 =) -$2,000 difference between award and budget that you must contribute.
You now know your cash flows: $2,000 to have saved up, $4,500 receivable in let's say March 2026, and $1,500 receivable in let's say September 2026 (to take home). Ignore the $1,500 for the time being. What's left is for you to spend $6,500 after you know the application succeeded.
(You can ignore this aside about tax planning. When you get the award in 2026, you get $6,000 of income for that year. If you follow this post successfully to the letter, you'll spend $6,500 on the project in the year 2026, leaving you with no tax liability but rather some deduction available to make. Indeed, even if the gear purchase you make per the next paragraph ends up having to go through capital cost allowance [CCA], the deductible expenses in 2026 won't exceed your award. You'll also get some GST help from claiming the ITCs on your expenses.)
You may spend up to 10% of the budget on "gear purchases, software, or other equipment necessary to complete the project". The maximum would be $800, so let's use $500 of that on a field recorder.
Next, let's pay the deposit for our studio vendor. Assuming one day of recording, one day of mixing, and 50% deposit at 900/day, you'll lay out $900, with the other $900 due in the next phase. The timing of the studio session depends on how aggressive you want to be about the risk of your application failing. If you need to wait for success to book the date, you might not be recording until the summer.
You now have (2000-500-900 =) $600 left of your savings still to spend. Use it to book a rehearsal space for $100 and pay your side musicians $100 each for the rehearsal. Record it with your field recorder.
Let's move on and consider the $4,500 advance. You already committed $900 to pay the studio balance, which will get you through both tracking and mixing: that leaves (4500-900 =) $3,600. From this amount, you need to pay for mastering, design, photography, and musician fees. Let's break that down as follows: mastering $900, design $400, photography $300, musician's fees (400*5 =) $2,000.
You've now finessed the cash flows of this grant program. All you had to do was save $2,000 upfront, and you get all the following.
Leading up to recording date:
- A field recorder and/or some other gear you get to keep, worth about $500
- A rehearsal at a rehearsal space, with musicians' pay
- The recording date and your musicians' pay, plus photography at the studio
After recording date:
- Design, artwork, and/or layout for the release
- Mixing
- Mastering
When you look at it this way, basically you get it all for only two costs:
- Commitment to a ~$500 gear purchase, which you get to keep
- The opportunity cost of locking up $1,500 for most of a year
I dunno about you, but that sounds good to me.
(There are some other considerations you could make about going ahead with the project in the event your application fails. The costs you really can't cut from a finished project would be probably these: the musicians' recording fees marked down by let's say 50%, the studio and mixing, and the mastering. That would come out to recording $900, mixing $900, mastering $900, musician's fees $1,000 = $3,700. Repurposing the $2,000 you saved up-front would cover the majority of it; saving another $1,700 in the first half of 2026 would get you through. Additionally, given the timing employed by this post, you'd actually end up with the option to try again the following year for subsidy of these expenses + other ones to get the job done.)