Ilkley Live is all about connecting musicians, audiences, and venues so that everyone in the town can benefit from live music. It is run by the community for the community.

Ilkley Live is registered with HMRC as a charity for tax relief and we are aiming to register with the Charity Commission as soon as we’re able to but our income is currently too low. We run as a charity with trustees and proper governance. Our charitable objects are all about community cohesion through music. See our charter below for more details.

We have big plans to support the community to come together for more music and so we are now collecting donations directly for Ilkley Live from the commercial venues and from the public. Ilkley Live is entirely run by volunteers so all donations go directly to serving our charitable objects. The uses of funds (now and future) are:

1. The first use of funds is to pay for the festival including public liability insurance, Performing Rights Society fees, publicity materials etc. This all adds up to about £800 so your donations primarily allow us to run a big festival while providing the necessary insurances and paying our dues to the copyright owners.
2. Secondly, we support events year-round by putting on and underwriting a number of other events. An example of this was the Busking Festival and other events. This means that we can all get together to hear more music and performers and venues can be paid for the work that that they do.
3. If we can raise enough of a surplus, we plan to provide grants to other community groups to support their music programmes, aligned to our charitable objects.
4. Part of our mission is building the capacity of the community so we will not only be building our sound engineering capability but also potentially buying equipment for community use.
5. There are other running costs such as hosting licenses, website builds etc that we need to cover to keep the organisation going.
6. Longer term, we dream of providing a community space to meet, rehearse and record but that is for another time...

Ilkley Live Community Music Festival

This is the annual event where it all started. Anyone who can play or sing anything can set up and perform in a garden and the audience can walk between locations and watch from the street or the garden itself. It’s totally community-run so just sign up and put on a show!

• Performers: Anyone can perform at Ilkley Live. When signup is open, you can create an account and sign up right here on the website. Before you do that, though, read the performer guide.
• Venues: If you are hosting yourself or other people at a venue, you should read the venue hosting guide.
• Sound engineers: we are always looking for people who are - or wish to become - a sound engineer to help the performers to put on a great show at the venues.
• Audience: iHang tight, you’ll soon be able to look at the programme, see all of the exciting acts that will be performing and start to plan your festival!en