As regular Ears To The House readers no doubt know – mostly because this site frequently points it out – Resident Advisor started to receive a £750,000 grant from Arts Council England in October 2020. The company was heavily slated for accepting the money, with Resident Advisor insisting it was crucial towards its survival through the pandemic.

But we can exclusively reveal this isn’t the only source of British taxpayers money which has been spent on propping up the struggling site. Accounts filed by Resident Advisor themselves at Companies House reveal they also received a £10,000 small business grant from Hackney Council in the same year.

A quick look at Hackney Council’s website reveals the grants previously available. It is unclear exactly under which criteria Resident Advisor applied for a grant – and it also turns out the site claimed £135,424 in 2021 in furlough payments from the British government’s Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme and £41,881 from a similar scheme running in Germany.

Elsewhere, the company’s accounts make for interesting reading. Resident Advisor Limited made a loss of £273,792 in 2021 – which sounds huge, but is dwarfed by the £567,685 loss from the year before. Net liabilities for the company rose to nearly £1million – up to £999,761 in 2021 compared to £681,652 in 2020.

And curiously, despite the often reported jobs hiring spree, the average number of employees at the company during 2021 actually declined to just 25 – compared to 35 in 2020. In contrast, the accounts filed in regards to Resident Advisor Tickets Ltd – their ticketing arm, as the name implies – were much more limited, but did disclose they made a tidy £229,929 profit during 2021.

This compares starkly with the £914,146 loss made by the ticketing arm during 2020 – showing a recovery is underway, although things are not quite back to the £293,489 profit reported by the company’s ticketing branch in 2019…