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Interview: Am, and the importance of the arts to Welsh language and culture

18 Jun 2025 8 minute read
Alun Llwyd, Am’s Chief Exec

Stephen Price

Am is the digital home of Welsh culture – from music to theatre to literature to visual arts and more.

It is a huge website that is home to over 480 cultural and social organisations in Wales who each have their own profile to showcase their work and activity, and this month it celebrates five years of showcasing the brightest and the best in Welsh creative talent.

Importantly, Am is free to access and free to have a profile, and is a source of some of the most incredible, innovative work happening in Wales today.

To mark the fifth year celebrations, a transformed website, and the launch of Am’s new digital festival, Nation.Cymru spoke with Chief Executive, Alun Llwyd to find out more about the innovative platform, why it formed in the first place, the importance of the arts in Welsh culture and a lot more.

Tell us more about the purpose of Am

Our overarching aim remains to grow an inclusive audience for Welsh culture, emphasizing the creativity of communities and ensuring all voices from all backgrounds have an open space to share work. We aim to make Welsh culture available to all, all in one place.

I should also give context to the name. Am is the Welsh word for ‘about’, signifying that the platform is about its content. Arguably the best Welsh language band ever – Datblygu – had a song called ‘Am’ from (what I think is) their best album called ‘Pyst’. I like to think that all the best things have a bit of Datblygu in them.

So how did the project initially come about?

Am grew out of our work with PYST (a music distribution and promotion system) and the realization that the digital revolution had led people to access their music and culture from new spaces and new platforms away from the traditional mainstream media.

We discussed with tens of Welsh cultural organizations and concluded that if we designed a new accessible collaborative digital space for Welsh culture, we could collectively build a  new digital audience for Welsh culture, leading to increased engagement and creativity. We spent a year developing it, launched it with 75 organisations/profiles on the platform……and three days later Covid hit and the world turned upside down.

Covid obviously created a need for Am that we had not foreseen and the numbers in terms of content, users and organizations rocketed, but our original mission had to take a back seat whilst we learnt and navigated our way through the digital awakening that Covid brought.

Thankfully the audience and organizations remained with us using and sharing Am, so it feels weirdly as if we have been starting again over the last year or two (but from a huge base) and returning to the original mission and ambitions. But hopefully wiser.

Working in the media, I’ve been surprised by the importance of ads, clicks and numbers – I’m satisfied if I create a piece that gives a leg up, or that I’ve enjoyed creating and it’s had 50 viewers as opposed to zillions for something that’s drivel or clickbait – how do you balance the need to get money in, give those leg-ups and focus on art?

Firstly, we have been privileged to have been supported by Welsh Government from the early days of setting up PYST as Wales’ first music distribution and promotion system.

We smashed all the targets required by the Welsh Government funding for PYST so when we came up with the concept of Am, Dafydd Elis Thomas as Culture Minister at the time, said we’d proved we knew what we were doing, and so funded Am from day one, giving us that critical time to develop and launch it. Without that support we wouldn’t be here.

Thankfully, that public funding has continued so the commercial concerns, although there, are not as intense as they are for other organisations. But we take the funding as a responsibility too. A responsibility to ensure that the trust placed in us is used to change things for good and particularly to ensure that arts and culture belongs to all, and we believe digital plays a huge part in that.

Digital has an even greater role now as we face a cost of living crisis, an accessibility crisis, a funding crisis for arts and culture – these are all challenges that digital mediums can begin to address.

You say Am has continued to grow. How?

I think that is what we are proudest of. We do receive funding to run it but that is funding for overheads and as is the case with most organizations these days, the money for marketing has never been there.

The growth therefore has been all organic and all stemming from everyone feeling ownership over Am and sharing content. We wanted Am to grow from the grassroots, to grow as a result of collaboration with an eco-system and as a result, the roots for growth run deep and has allowed is to grow steadily (aside from the Covid ‘explosion’).

Am: The Digital Home of Welsh Culture

The more we collaborate with new communities, the usage of Am keeps growing. Five years later though, I am still explaining what Am is and that alone is a crucial grounding in realising that we are on a journey that we can never afford to take for granted. But if you asked me how we grew it, I would say that is all been down to that collaboration and fostering a practice of shared learning and resources.

On that note, theres been a reappraisal in how we here in Wales view our own work and talent and measure our own success. We arent going to sell millions or top charts, but were keeping the language living and vibrant, were giving voices to new talent.. its embedded in who we are as a culture.. are you seeing this with the groups youre working with? 

In terms of Welsh arts and culture, I think we measure the success by the huge amount of diverse and varied creativity that exists here.

The challenge is to make sure everyone knows about it and has access to it – beginning in Wales.

The number of organisations and projects that I had no idea existed until research for Am is frightening, and that is before you even dive in to the wealth of community arts taking place in every corner of the country.

I think it was Mike Parker in a wonderful essay in ‘Welsh (Plural): Essays on the Future of Wales’ who questioned our obsession about being better and bigger all the time, and why we couldn’t celebrate what we are, and I totally agree.

We face huge challenges to sustain creative organisations, to realise that culture can become the driver of social, linguistic and economic prosperity in the future, and if we can work towards sustaining, democratising and growing our cultural activity then we are really on a road to meaningful and long-term change.

With half a decade done, what are you hoping to see in the next five years?

I think we, or maybe we and the users, have now defined Am’s place in the world.

We are a small nation, but as for any healthy culture I think Wales needs a platform like Am –  a platform that is open, democratic and participatory.

AmCam

We don’t compete with mainstream media, and I think that if we are to ensure that the arts and culture is accessible to everyone, then Wales not only needs S4C, BBC, ITV etc it also needs an Am, and that collaboration between all forms of Welsh media is pivotal for the benefit of those media and those creating and engaging with arts and culture in Wales.

Moving forward with Am, I would like to see us being able to create more opportunities for creative and community organisations to create and document.

We have started this with our community digital film festival AmCam, but this needs to go further so that all voices and all communities feel they have access to opportunities and an audience.

And what’s been the most important thing about the first five years of Am?

The content obviously, the growth, the collaborations, the incredible team(s) that have and do run Am are the four obvious ones.

But personally, the most important thing has been our partnership with Disability Arts Cymru.

We have learnt so much from them and the privilege of being able to promote them as an organisation and then showcase the creativity of their amazing members to a wider audience is something I truly cherish and is the best example of what Am is about. 

To mark its five-year milestone, Am launched its first-ever digital film festival, AmCam, on 18 June.

Supported by Arts Council Wales, AmCam coincides with the relaunch of its redesigned website – developed to improve accessibility and enhance user experience. The festival will premiere four original short films portraying life, art and resilience across Welsh communities

Enjoy the AmCam digital film festival by visiting the brand new Am website at ambobdim.cymru.


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