Helping independent musicians with Covid 19
This fund has been set up to assist a small portion of the venues, musicians and crew that are currently suffering from the ongoing Covid-19 crisis. Almost every venue, musician and crew member lost their work over-night, many of us - Including myself were left stranded in other countries with tours being canceled over-night.
On this page I will explain my story, however the point of this fund is to help 10 different artists, crew, and venues by splitting the fund into portions of 10% - This is why your donations are VITAL to make each portion an amount that will actually make a difference.
If you are a struggling musician, tech, crew member or venue and would like to apply for the fund please send me a message via this page. Each applicant to the fund must provide evidence that they have lost a significant amount of money due to the virus crisis.
MY STORY:
My name is Ian, I'm a 30 year old tour booker and manager, this means that as-well as booking and planning music tours I head out on the tours and look after the musicians.
I run these tours myself, and have run Scorpio Promotions alone for over 10 years. I'm not backed by a company and survive day to day travelling without a home and living off the small amount of money that venues pay us. This means I have very little financial security - I had a small amount of savings which was put aside to 1 day set up a dog shelter, sadly the impact of brexit pretty much destroyed these cash reserves.
In Feb 2020 due to an artist having travel issues, I took out a loan in order to save a tour that had been 6 months in the planning - this wasn't a big issue as the tour would have covered the loan with a small amount left over as profit. On March 12th I took a flight from London to Luxembourg City to begin this tour.
Arriving at a friends place in Luxembourg we had a quick beer and I jumped into bed to get some sleep before final prep for the tour the following day. Upon waking up to 30 new messages and a ton of missed calls I gathered something wasn't quite right. 10mins later 4 future tours had all been canceled, leaving me not only with no working money, but with a £3,000 bill, and being stuck in Luxembourg.
I hadn't even booked a flight back home given that I was supposed to be travelling back home with a musician via car. Now, to spin forward a little I managed to thankfully get a coach back to the UK (Thanks to a donation from my parents) booked for the following day and made it back after a 40h ride (Including 4 changes in countries thanks to closing boarders)
This was honestly 1 of the worst and most scary moments of my work life - I can't explain taking a small amount of money from my parents, booking a coach, being left with £1 in my account and then having countries close their boarders while your on 1 of the coaches. I had no idea if I would make it back and what I'd do if anything else went wrong.
Thats my story, but it definitely isn't the only hardship people in the indestry are facing. We work incredibly hard, we have no security and no means of "working". I know most of the people reading this will be in exactly the same boat with their work stopped and money being tight, but please remember, Creatives, entertainers and venues stuggle incredibly hard to keep the general public entertained and happy, now we really do need your help - please help if you can.
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This fund is designed specifically to help low income and independent musicians, however to give an idea of how much our industry is suffering a full list of major event cancelations can be found here :
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.billboard.com/amp/articles/business/touring/9323647/concerts-canceled-coronavirus-list
A number of live facebook events will be taking place each Sunday over at www.scorpiopromotions.com
Artists wishing to claim or other enquires can be sent to : [email redacted]
Keep Music Alive ... Keep Music Live
