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 Camille Buscot from the German Jazz Union and Caroline Scholz from the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation.

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.

The first Musikfonds publication was released by PFAU-Verlag in November 2020. It provides an insight into the first 500 projects funded by the Musikfonds from the first meeting of the Board of Trustees in 2017 to 2019.

The second publication will follow in June 2024, documenting almost 800 funded projects from 2020 to 2023. During the coronavirus pandemic, Musikfonds launched two new funding programs: Almost 3,300 grants were awarded in the scholarship program, and over 900 grants were awarded as part of the funding for ensembles and bands. Thanks to the increase in funding from the NEUSTART KULTUR program of the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media, it was possible to support the current music scene in Germany and maintain its broad artistic spectrum.

The published statistical figures provide information on the distribution of previous funding across the various federal states and genres; the volumes also impressively document the diversity and development of the free experimental music scene in Germany with all its interdisciplinary and cross-genre trends in numerous short texts and photos.

The publications are available free of charge online or as a book from the Musikfonds or Pfau-Verlag.