Pyst Cyf’s busy 2025: Finding space amid challenges to Wales’ culture, arts and language

Alun Llwyd, PYST Cyf

It has been a busy 2025. An inspiring 2025. A 2025 where the challenges to ensure growth and resilience for culture, arts and language in Wales became starker than ever.

A 2025 that forced us all to address our values, behaviour and working practices. In the middle of it all, somehow, PYST Cyf as a company (operating a digital music distribution system: PYST and a digital cultural website: Am), found its feet and found its space……

1. PYST Music Fund

Diolch to Welsh Government through Creative Wales, we distributed £75k in grants to support Welsh grassroots music activity.

These grants funded a previously unsupported but crucial part of the Welsh music and cultural ecosystem: the mainly part-time, and labour-of love record labels and music organisations that ensure community expression and participation through music.

Without these, most of the Welsh music your hear and most of the opportunities you hear about, would simply not exist. There is an invaluable social, economic and creative importance to their work and it was a privilege to play a small part in helping them continue their crucial work.

We hope to return with a bigger fund in 2026.

2. Am  – a digital home for Welsh culture

Am – https://www.ambobdim.cymru/en/  – celebrated its fifth birthday this year, with a rebranding and a shiny accessible new website. Am began as an idea of developing a digital home and audience for Welsh culture but since then has been through a pandemic, a national digital awakening, an ongoing arts funding crisis and came out on the other side where everything felt totally different.

But Am remains, supported by a growing audience and a growing number of profiles (cultural organisations present on the site).

Simultaneously we discovered that our five year organic growth had turned into a five year organic role-defining journey.

Am now stands at a point where we are exploring how a democratic cultural website develops to support wider engagement and participation with Welsh arts and culture, on a community and national level.

3. PYST Music Distribution

PYST Music Distribution was formed and exists to ensure that record labels in Wales have the support and mechanisms to distribute, promote, collect and distribute incomes.

This  allows them to work with, and release work by generations of new artists. 2025 saw PYST distribute more records than ever in its seven year history and distribute more labels than ever before.

PYST’s role has never felt more vital but even more importantly being part of a growing community of independent record labels that share learning and resource, has been an incredibly inspiring place to be.

4. A Four Day Working Week

Pyst Cyf is a small team – a team who live and breathe what we do and always go the extra mile. But that comes with its challenges and we are constantly aware of the need to look after each other, to make sure work-life balance is right and that the workplace reflects the values and ethos of the communities we serve. Trialling a four day week seemed a natural step.

Our research surprised us in terms of how few organisations were working a four day week in Wales therefore our preparation had to be based on extensive staff discussions as well as some useful insight from Disability Arts Cymru and Community Energy Wales (both of whom are trialling it) and other European test cases online. 

We are still in a trial period. Spoiler – it seems to be working.

5. AmCam Online Film Festival

PYST Cyf is privileged to be one of Arts Council of Wales’ multi-year funded organisations: specifically supported for Am’s Community work.

Part of this work is to facilitate, encourage and platform digital community expression. 2025 saw the launch of our AmCam film festival – a film festival of commissioned work reflecting film-makers ideas of, and documenting, community life.

We expected a handful of applications –  we received over 75. We could only commission 4.

The brilliant first four films can be seen here https://www.ambobdim.cymru/en/discover/amcam/ 

AmCam2 and AmCam3 will be online in the early part of 2026.

AmCam also taught us a valuable lesson, namely that supporting and platforming community expression on its own terms, is crucial to any democratic media.

It is another one of the building blocks that makes Am what it is.

6. PYST x S4C Video Fund

2025 saw the third round of the PYST x S4C Music Video Fund.

S4C fund the creation of 20 music videos by new artists who have not previously made a music video,  the artist is then free to use the video as a promotional tool for a new release on their own social media and platforms. This year saw the fund properly explode.

The first two years had seen a total of 30 videos commissioned in three years but this year we were inundated.

We subsequently commissioned 20 videos in the first six months of the fund, reflecting an increase in the number of new artists and at the same time the lack of opportunities ‘traditional media’ allow new artists.

This example of S4C funding a series of videos that only benefit the artists’ own agenda is a wonderful indication of where we need to go. All the videos – past and present – can be seen here: https://www.ambobdim.cymru/en/discover/lwp-x-pyst/ 

7. Community Arts Network

All of the six points above have been both inspiring and a hugely privileged experience for us.. But I would like to finish on a random one but one I think that has led me – and continues to lead me – to the real value of meaningful collaborative work.

When PYST Cyf was awarded Arts Council of Wales Multi-Year Funding status we looked at the list of who else had obtained that status and saw four organisations that we knew little about but that worked in the field of Community Arts and all within a small geographical area.

I decided to visit them all.

I explained who we were, explained I had no real idea why I was there but that something told me we all had something in common.

Over the next two months we spent days (a day each in each other’s location) hearing what we each other did, looking at what we had in common – positives and negatives – and getting to know each other.

Then all five organisations – People Speak Up, Citrus Arts, Tanio, YMa and Am – spent a further two sharing sessions, climbing out of our silos, realising we had created a safe and non-competitive space and that what we could achieve together had huge potential to further empower engagement and participation in community arts as well as develop the resilience of each organisation.

Subsequently, we were successful in obtaining a grant to help explore this further and the results of this exploration in 2026 will, we hope, be of value not just to the five of us but to other communities.