Goal of the Musikfonds is to promote contemporary music of all genres in all its diversity and complexity.

The Musikfonds focuses on highly ambitious not commercially oriented music that sees art for art's sake, as an existential-creative necessity or as a consequence of an indispensable will to express oneself. It is independent, forward-looking and experimental, ahead of its time and visionary, explosive, controversial, provocative, and thus formative even for established, economically viable parts of the music industry.

With its support measures, the Musikfonds addresses all genres, intersections, cross-genre and interdisciplinary approaches to avant-garde music production. 
This includes the genres of new music and contemporary modernism, experimental jazz and improvised music, free and real-time music, electronic and electro-acoustic music, experimental pop and rock, radical trends in DJing and dance, audio installations and sound art.

The Musikfonds receives a total of 2 million Euro annually from the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media. These funds are used to finance both project funding and the office with all necessary day-to-day operations.

At the suggestion of the former Minister of State for Culture and Media, Prof. Monika Grütters, Musikfonds e.V. was founded in September 2016 by seven associations and institutions involved in the german music scene.

Prof. Martin Maria Krüger, President of the German Music Council, was unanimously elected chairman of Musikfonds e.V.. His deputies are Dr. Julia Cloot from Frankfurt and Felix Falk from Berlin.

The association is based in Berlin.

In 2022, the Musikfonds commissioned Birnkraut Consulting (Hamburg) to evaluate its funding activities and their impact. The results are available to the public in the Impact Report (71 pages), an abridged version (7 pages) is published as Executive Summary.

In November 2020, the first publication of the Musikfonds was published by PFAU-Verlag. It provides insight into the first 500 projects that have been funded by the Musikfonds since the first meeting of the Board of Trustees in 2017, until 2019.

The published statistical figures provide information on the distribution of funding to date across the various federal states and genres; but the volume also impressively documents the diversity and development of the independent experimental music scene in Germany with all its interdisciplinary and cross-genre currents in numerous short texts and photos.

The publication is available free of charge online or as a a printed version from the Musikfonds or from Pfau-Verlag.