Applications for the 2027 Management Workshop Program open on 21 October and close on Friday 20 November
The Seed Fund will celebrate its 21st birthday in 2027, and applications are now open for the 2027 cohort of its Management Workshop Program, a five-day live-in intensive followed by a twelve-month mentorship for emerging managers and self-managed artists.
The program began in 2005, when John Butler and Danielle Caruana (Mama Kin) set out to build an artist-led support network. Touring the country, they saw again and again how many incredible Australian artists had ineffective management, or were not seen as bona fide when they tried to manage themselves, in an industry heavily blocked by gatekeepers. The first workshop ran in 2006 at the Clarendon Hotel in Katoomba, with 20 emerging managers and self-managed artists.
Each year the program now hosts 35 managers and self-managed artists for the intensive, with the mentorship year facilitated by alumni of the program. The alumni community has grown to more than 360 people, and many of them return to speak at the intensive and keep the circle of reinvesting in the music community turning.
Danielle Caruana looks back on those early days in Katoomba: “It felt like such a simple idea; let’s get a room full of emerging managers and self-managed artists and share all of our resources and connect them to the people they wish they could have a coffee with and fire questions at.” John Butler adds: “I’m struck that after this many years the program is still embedded with the same exact spirit as we started. It’s always been an act of building connection. To focus on community rather than competition, relationships over industry.”
The Seed is a not-for-profit organisation, artist-founded and led. The 2026 Management Workshop Program was made possible by philanthropic contributions from John Butler, Wonderlick Entertainment, Eleven Management, Look Out Kid, Love Police ATM, Unified Music Group, Sorrento Strategic Accounting, One Louder and Conchord Music Publishing ANZ, and was funded by the NSW Government through Sound NSW.
Applications for The Seed 2027 close at COB on Friday 20 November 2026. Managers and self-managed artists can apply at theseedfund.org/apply.
