There’s a lot of good things to report on today: good fuel to help us face up to the challenge of the bad things. Start with the latest announcement by the US Recording Academy’s MusiCares arm about a new flurry of donations to its Covid-19 Relief Fund. UMG and WMG; StubHub; Alicia Keys and She Is The Music; Bill Silva Entertainment and City National Bank are among the latest chipping in.
Live Nation, meanwhile, has kicked off ‘Crew Nation’, a relief fund focusing on the crew members who work on live shows. The fund will be administered by charity Music Forward Foundation, and will see Live Nation commit $5m upfront, and match the next $5m donated by artists, fans and employees. Applications will open soon, and there’s a Crew Nation website up and running.
Elsewhere, Beatport’s recent ‘ReConnect’ 34-hour livestream attracted more than 8.5m views and more than 6,200 donors. Beatport has so far raised more than $180k for the World Health Organization’s Covid-19 Solidarity Response Fund, and the AFEM Members’ Covid-19 Hardship Fund, with the public element on Tiltify (where it has raised more than $163k) still open for donations. Boiler Room and Ballantines have also launched a fund of their own: 20 grands of £5k each that will be distributed to people in need by community-driven collectives taking part in Boiler Room’s ‘Streaming from Isolation’ series.
More? Cheers today for Jay-Z and Rihanna, whose foundations are donating $1m each for Covid-19 response efforts; for Selena Gomez, who’s donating to the Cedars-Sinai hospital; and to Irish collecting society IMRO, which is making its radio distributions monthly as of April, to speed up payments to songwriters.
Oh, and hurrah too for George Ezra’s mum. The popular British artist’s mother started a chain of events that saw Ezra persuade his label and publishers to waive royalties from his songs ‘Shotgun’ and ‘Paradise’ so that they could be used for livestreamed fitness classes by UK influencer Joe Wicks. Also known as ‘The Body Coach’, he’s been streaming a 9am workout on YouTube every morning aimed at children and their families, to help them get some daily exercise – and has promised to donate all the revenues to the National Health Service.
“Joe mentioned that it was a shame that there was no music on during the classes but because of copyright issues he couldn’t use songs in the background,” wrote Ezra on Instagram. “My mum suggested I offer Joe and the kids my songs to use. I got in touch with Joe and we made it happen. The coolest thing is that all royalties made from the songs being used are going directly to the NHS.”
Image by Olga Visavi / Shutterstock.com
No comments:
Post a Comment