HeadCount Blog

Ann Jones Donohue introduces herself

12:20 PM, CST: Here I am, HeadCount’s fearless (false) former “Man on the Lot”/summer intern and current law student, waiting for HeadCount’s panel to begin here at the city Convention Center in surprisingly frigid Austin, Texas.  SXSW, or “South By” as the locals call it, is abuzz with talk of the tragic passing of incredibly influential “alternative-before-there-was-alternative” Alex Chilton.  The sadness is particularly eerie given the fact that a Big Star panel is occurring at the same time as ours.

12:43 PM: Michael Martin is talking about Jack Johnson’s community change entity, All at Once.  “For every person that views a given non-profit’s video, Jack donates a dollar to the non-profit.  It encourages these non-profits to get involved and get others involved.  At one point, the record being offered for download was the most downloaded song in history.”

12:45 PM: Darryl Friedman is talking about the difficulties the Grammy telecast faced in encouraging Haiti relief efforts.  Sample highlight: “I don’t know if Andrea Bocelli tweets himself or if he has somebody else tweet for him.”  My general impression is that Andrea Bocelli tweets less (memorably) than Shaq.  “The numbers are so great because we created this ongoing connection with the fans that started before the event and continued on thereafter.”

12:49 PM: Scott Goodstein is discussing artist immersion.  “From the artist to the fan in a direct way, a la Fat Mike talking to his crowd.  Now we can have texts to and from artist and fanbase.”  Scott just told the entire panel, a room full of roughly 75 people to pull out their phones and text JGD to 738674.  He then clarified, “Messaging and data rates may apply.”  Billy Bragg’s Jail Guitar Doors just launched the initiative at SXSW.  Is anyone else reminded of the Judd Nelson-defying performance from Airheads by this?

12:53 PM: Andy asks, somewhat rhetorically, “Will an artist get the same personal energy rush from using text messaging towards a cause that it seems to me they get from the onstage shout-out?”

12:58 PM: Michael Martin addresses the HeadCount MusicforAction campaign.  “I really love what HeadCount’s done with the Bonnaroo live tracks.  You have to incentivize these things.”  In case you’re wondering, fans  to date have sent roughly 30,000 letters to the Senate via MfA.

1:05 PM: Scott Goodstein believes that increasingly cost-efficient application development, combined with the proliferation of smartphones is the most likely next most influential technological shift.  Scott noted that Chris from Death Cab for Cutie’s application was actually developed by a fan.  Darryl Friedman added that the ease of GPS-based applications will change the social networking process forever.  It’s kind of scary how many people in this panel room are actually using their cell phones while the panel is taking place.

1:08 PM: The first question from the audience came from a man who immediately acknowledged how tough it was this morning “after last night.”  The guy looks pretty hungover.  I wonder what he drank.  Addressing the carbon footprint of many of the campaigns, Ann Jones Donohue suggested that offsetting emissions via donations is very common.  Ann is talking about the Ditty Bops, who bike to and from their concerts.  Michael Martin: “Offsets: it’s a complicated issue.  Some just suck.  Others are phenomenal.  It’s a valid issue.  Obviously the best thing is to have no emissions but short of that, in the world we live in, there will be some emissions, and we must just do what we can do.”  Darryl Friedman: “10 years ago, we had Cadillac Escalades dropping off artists on the red carpet.  It’s not like that anymore, obviously, but the process of change is sometimes easier said than done and occasionally out of our hands.”

1:13 PM: Ann is talking about “Gaga for Haiti Day.”  100% of our proceeds from all merch sales that day went to Haiti.  The campaign raised $235,000 on MusicToday.  “The fans took action and communicated via links on social networking sites to tell others.”  I could take this opportunity to make a joke about how Lady Gaga (and her wardrobe designer) are from 2115 (as is their drug stash?,) but I won’t.  Scott corrected a pro-SXSWInteractive questioner and asserted that Trent Reznor did more via Twitter in raising awareness than any of the “so-called Twitterati did.”

1:18 PM: Scott said, “Cause-related marketing can be effective from the artist, but authenticity is rarely what it needs to be.  Being funded by major corporations can work right when it’s authentic.”  I’m reminded, of course, of this.  Scott is talking about Chris Shiflett from the Foo Fighters and Tom Morello and their contributions to the health care campaign.  Michael Martin revealed an upcoming Dave Matthews Band summer campaign against plastic bottles at shows.

1:25 PM: For what it’s worth, there are alot of gorgeous women in this room.  My opinion: SXSW = Milf Paradise.  There are also alot of heavyset fellas.  I think by and large that everybody who’s of average weight in the room is in a band.  Much more importantly, Scott Goodstein is talking about Rise Against’s work against suicide.  Mike: “Different artists are geared towards different issues.  A performance doesn’t always make sense.”

1:30 PM: Andy in closing: “There is an art and a science with musicians.  HeadCount works with 80 different artists.  That’s our whole thing.  A great way to raise money with artists is things like Meet and Greets or signed item auctions and it’s not costing the artists anything.  When the artist has a foundation though, and is there to write checks, sometimes it’s the total opposite.  About half of HeadCount’s funding comes from artist-related initiatives.  It really is about trying to think like the artist and know what will feel good for them.”

1:32 PM: Thanks for following along guys.  Remember: what you do matters, whether you’re playing MSG or a high school dance.  Feel free to comment below.

HeadCount Executive Director Andy Bernstein hosts a panel titled “Effecting Social Change Via Music and Technology” at SXSW in Austin. It takes place Saturday, March 20, at 12:30 p.m. in room 15 at the Austin Convention Center.

The panelists:
Ann Jones Donohue, Musictoday
Michael Martin, Effects Partners
Daryl Friedman, The Recording Academy
Scott Goodstein, Revolution Messaging LLC

If you’re attending SXSW, please stop by.

After 11 years, the all-female Lilith Fair tour – now simply known as Lilith – has announced its first eight dates and lineups of the summer.

Lilith co-founder Sarah McLachlan is the only performer who will appear at each of the tour’s 36 shows. The other 10 acts on each bill will draw from a rotating pool of 80 performers that includes The Bangles, Beth Orton, Brandi Carlile, Cat Power, Corinne Bailey Rae, Emmylou Harris, Erykah Badu, Mary J. Blige, Sia, Grace Potter and the Nocturnals, and many women more.

Lilith Fair first took place from 1997-99 and raised more than $10 million for various organizations. This summer Lilith focuses on The i4c Campaign, as in “I foresee a better tomorrow.” One dollar from each ticket will be devoted to raising awareness about Triple Bottom Line Companies. These companies are created by people with innovative ideas that can better our lives, such as a business that creates and sell solar lanterns or a company that collects and sells books online to fund global literacy initiatives.

Lilith’s first eight dates go on sale March 27:

Date City Venue
July 2 Portland, OR The Amphitheatre at Clark County
July 3 Seattle, WA The Gorge Amphitheatre
July 17 Chicago, IL First Midwest Bank Amphitheatre
July 20 Indianapolis, IN Verizon Wireless Music Center
Jul 24 Toronto, ON Molson Canadian Amphitheatre
July 27** Cleveland, OH Blossom Music Center
August 8 Atlanta, GA Aaron’s Amphitheatre
August 10 West Palm Beach, FL Cruzan Amphitheatre
(**Tickets go on-sale April 3)

Cult rock icon Alex Chilton died yesterday in New Orleans.

Ann Powers does him justice in the Los Angeles Times: “What I found on that journey was Alex Chilton. I’d already come to love Big Star’s catalog, introduced to me via the mix tapes my friends and I made for each other as we built our own twisted history of Americana from what the band X once called “the unheard music.” Alex Chilton was a wandering, heretical patriarch of our new religion. Bands like the Replacements and R.E.M. found him inspirational. (Members of one such group, the Posies, would later play with a reformed Big Star.) College radio DJs turned Big Star’s catchy but unkempt songs into the hits they should have been the first time around. The band had been active in the 1970s, but they belonged to us, the kids fighting off the shadow of the Baby Boomers who’d been too dumb to realize how great it was.”

Read the rest here.

We here at HeadCount clearly believe music has an inherent ability to motivate and inspire.

But why is that?

“Music just touches a place deep inside people that makes them feel really good,” said Leaving a Positive Legacy’s Ann Kenworthy. “And when they’re feeling really good, they want to put that good energy back into the world.”

It seems natural, then, that organizers of some of the feel-goodiest events of the year – Jam Cruise and Caribbean Holidaze – would launch a nonprofit aimed at putting that good energy back into the communities they visit.

Positive Legacy formally launched as the nonprofit arm of Cloud 9 Adventures earlier this year, though the group has conducted charity drives to benefit a Jamaican girls orphanage for the past two years.

More recently, fans and artists on Jam Cruise 8 participated in an intercultural celebration in Jamaica and learned about reef protection in Grand Cayman – donating time, money, and resources to benefit both efforts.

“Over the years, as Jam Cruise has traveled to different Caribbean countries which are much less fortunate than the United States, music fans carried around a little sense of guilt with them as they stepped off this luxurious cruise ship and into impoverished areas,” Kenworthy said. “So we try to create events to make people feel better and bridge that gap.”

The Positive Legacy team visited Claremont’s Rural Retreat Community Center in Jamaica during last year’s Carribean Holidaze. They learned about its residents’ dream of starting a marching band if they could only afford instruments. Music Matters and Cloud 9 Adventures came to the rescue and donated a full set of instruments. Read the rest of this entry »

Sometimes the whole is greater than the sum of its parts – like listening to Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon from start to finish.

So hats off to British Chancellor Sir Andrew Morritt, who agreed with the band this week that individual songs should not be sold online without the band’s permission.

In court, Morritt said the band’s contract with EMI contained a clause to “preserve the artistic integrity of the albums,” according to the BCC. “Artistic integrity” sounds especially quaint with a British accent.

EMI, which was recently dealt another blow when OK Go fled to start its own label because of a ban on embedding its videos, said it has not yet been ordered to stop selling single tracks. Songs could eventually be removed from iTunes and other digital music services.

No doubt Pink Floyd viewed its albums as complete works of art, as did many other artists working in the dark predigital era. Preserving albums’ integrity is believed to be one reason why the Beatles, whose catalog is also part of the EMI empire, haven’t sold individual songs online.

Garth Brooks and AC/DC are among other musicians critical of splitting up their albums.

Thursday’s ruling came as part of an ongoing legal dispute between Pink Floyd and EMI regarding payment of online royalties. The group, which signed with the label in 1967, is challenging the way their digital sales are calculated.

HeadCount co-founder Marc Brownstein, the bubbling bass man with The Disco Biscuits, is on a roll.

On March 16, the Biscuits release Planet Anthem, an ambitious left turn of an album full of ambitious pop experiments. The album is already causing a ruckus among fans, who’ve been hearing some of the new material on tour. The Biscuits will mark its release with a seven-show East Coast run and will then head south.

On Sunday, March 21, the Biscuits will kick off their first Bisco Power Mission benefit with an intimate (and already sold-out) gig at Brooklyn Bowl . The show’s proceeds will assist the purchase of a solar installation for Philadelphia’s Albert M. Greenfield Elementary School and will also benefit HeadCount’s new Music for Action initiative.

We recently spoke with Marc about all these things and more, including how he became a politically engaged person, the secret origin of HeadCount, why he recently shut down his Facebook page, the influence of MGMT on Planet Anthem, and the difference between hippies and hipsters.

HeadCount: Let’s start by talking about Music for Action and the Bisco Power Mission. How did this HeadCount-Disco Biscuits collaboration come about?

Marc Brownstein: As you know, I’m HeadCount’s Co-Chair, so I’m heavily involved with the issue of voter registration. As the election wound down last year, we started to think about HeadCount’s future and how we could keep people engaged during the off years. I’ve long argued that if we really want to make a difference, we should get people emotionally involved in certain important issues; because if we’re not talking about issues, we’re not really doing anything. Getting people out to vote is great. But what’s the point of doing that if our beliefs still aren’t being represented even after a change in leadership? So Music for Action and “What’s Your Issue?” are about making sure the people in our scene are represented. We wanted to get HeadCount artists more involved in these issues, too. So we plan to match up artists with the six issues HeadCount is pushing for and figure out specific, custom-tailored initiatives for all of them to collaborate on with us. The Bisco Power Mission is a chance for the Disco Biscuits and HeadCount to work on the issue of renewable energy. On our best nights, there’s a flow of energy from the stage to the crowd, we drive each other; we empower each other. So Bisco Power Mission’s goal is to harness our scene’s energy and actually turn it into real long-lasting energy.

Why did The Disco Biscuits decide to work on a renewable-energy project?

Renewable energy and sustainability has been an important issue for Jon Gutwillig. He’s been advocating a new energy policy ever since we played the Primary Colors for Peace Concert in Washington DC in 2002. We’ve had many conversations about how the politics of our country are deeply intertwined with our energy policies. During the ’90s, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, and Paul Wolfowitz all signed the Statement of Principles developed by the Project for the New American Century. They envisioned an imperial American government that needed to stabilize the Middle East in order to control its natural resources. So it stands to reason that we can either stabilize the region militarily, and live off its oil reserves for who knows how long, or we can develop alternative forms of energy ourselves. Jon argues that if we’d taken the money we’ve spent, and continue to spend, on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and redirected that money into developing alternative energy sources, we could have already put nearly a trillion dollars into renewable energy and saved hundreds of thousands of lives.

I imagine the Disco Biscuits are starting on a somewhat smaller scale.

Yes. Half the money we raise through the Bisco Power Mission will go to construct solar panels in Philadelphia’s Albert M. Greenfield Elementary School, and the other half will go to HeadCount to support our voter-registration and civic-engagement activities.

Why did the band choose Greenfield?

We had 22 applications and many criteria, but it came down to two or three schools in the Philly area. We chose Greenfield because it already had a solar project going on. They’d also raised money through their own nonprofit organization, and we wanted to contribute to an ongoing project. We made an onsite visit and saw that we could make it happen this year. Greenfield students and Disco Biscuits fans will install the solar panels together this summer.

When did you first become a real politically engaged guy?

It started in 10th grade at Brooklyn Poly Prep with my biology teacher, Mrs. Stone. She scared the living crap out of us. She told us that if major changes didn’t happen immediately, the ice caps were going to melt within 15 years and 12 feet of water would cover Manhattan. I’ve thought of myself as an environmentalist ever since. My friends and I were recycling before recycling was happening, and taking our own bags to the supermarket. We’re not underwater yet, but if you look at the weather patterns over the past few years, you see some really weird shit going on. The hypothesis is that the ice caps are melting, cooling down the Pacific Ocean and lowering the jet stream’s temperature.

I started to think politically, though, when I discovered the Project for a New American Century website. These guys were writing about the need for a cataclysmic event the size of Pearl Harbor being necessary for the United States to go to war in the Middle East. To this day, I can’t believe people don’t know that the neoconservatives who spent eight years in power had actually been waiting almost 10 years for something like 9/11 to happen. That’s when I started to get political.

How did you and Andy Bernstein start HeadCount?

Andy called me up one day in 2003 and said that George W. Bush was making him want to throw things at his TV. We both simply felt the need to do something. So we started calling people and making connections. It became increasingly clear that we wanted to reach everybody in the scene, not just people who felt the same as us. And we weren’t sure why Rock the Vote wasn’t having a greater effect. For us, it was a no-brainer: So many people were going to concerts, all we had to do was be there. Andy used to work for NYPIRG and was a nonprofit guy from the start, and I’m a musician, so we pooled our resources and came up with HeadCount. And then it just snowballed. The telling moment for us was when the managers of the Dave Matthews Band, the Grateful Dead, and Phish got together to talk about what they were going to do about registering voters, and Bob Weir told them about HeadCount. We spent all of 2004 doing it right, working with our volunteers very closely, and talking to our team leaders and regional coordinators multiple times a week.

Climate change drives huge amounts of traffic on Facebook, which is increasingly being used to inform large groups of people about both causes and music. You had a robust Facebook presence too, at least until you pulled the plug recently. What made stop interacting with your 5,000 friends?

I felt like I was wasting a lot of time. Our new album drops this week and I’m working on three other albums right now. We’re working on the next Disco Biscuits album. We’re remixing an album called 24 Hour Karate School, a hip-hop mixtape collaboration with Mos Def, the Cool Kids, Ski Beatz, Damon Dash, and some other rappers. And we’re also making our own hip-hop album with the same artists; we’re on our fifth song.

That said, it’s really fun to be on Facebook when you’re on tour. It can be an incredible tool for keeping in touch with people, but it can also be a time suck with just too much information. I have 5,000 Facebook friends, but I don’t know 4,700 of them, and the feed became overwhelming. I couldn’t handle it. Most of the kids in our scene are extremely respectful, but a couple of “friends” overstepped their bounds. I was giving people access they don’t usually get, and I really enjoyed the relationship. But there were a couple of instances when people would send me mail that made me want to take a step back and spend more time in the studio. In one instance, someone made a back-handed compliment I might have taken the wrong way, but I fired back and got in there and let them have it. I felt really bad afterward. I knew I shouldn’t be punching back at fans, so I decided to just let them have their opinions even if it meant shutting down the outlet. Now I’m finding Twitter to be a much better way to communicate with our fans.

Planet Anthem was a long time coming. Since the Biscuits’ previous album, the music industry has virtually collapsed, while innumerable trends have come and gone. Was it hard staying ahead of the curve?

It’s really cool that this many years and five albums in, we’ve made a record that’s getting a superpositive reaction from corporate America. We’re getting a lot of positive response, and the video’s on MTV2. Planet Anthem’s more critically acclaimed than anything we’ve done previously, which were more like jamband albums. Many new types of music have come out since Señor Boombox, and when we hear new sounds, we want to figure out how to make them. If we don’t do that. we might as well just quit. Then MGMT (a group of jamband fans, by the way) came along and made an incredibly superfunky and retro-cool album that turned the music industry on its side and brought the hipster and jamband worlds together. For me there are no musical barriers; music is music, one love. Hipsters would definitely disagree about this. But for me, the only difference between hipsters and hippies is how tight their jeans are. There’s really is no jamband scene anymore. Everything is coming together. Everyone is making music together.

And finally, if you had to pick one, who would it be: Aston “Family Man” Barrett or Robbie Shakespeare?

Wow. “Family Man” is an idol of mine. And since I’ve had the pleasure of meeting him and telling him what he is to me, I’d pick him.

Creators of brilliant videos and slightly lesser pop music, OK Go has split from stodgy old EMI and formed its own label, Parachute Records.

The issue of contention? EMI decided to block the embed feature of the band’s YouTube videos, meaning viewers could not share the band’s videos on third-party websites like this one. For a band famous for its viral YouTube videos – and known to be outspoken supporters of net neutrality – EMI’s decision was simply silly.

In March 2008, when I was working on Capitol Hil, I attended a briefing on net neutrality chiefly (I admit) because it featured OK Go members Damian Kulash and Andy Ross. Leanin on a heavy wood table, dressed in suits with guitars in arms, Damian and Andy recounted a story Damian had also told congressmen when testifying before the House Judiciary Committee’s Anti-Trust Task Force hearing. Read the rest of this entry »

Glenn Beck spelled out the secret meaning of Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land” on his Fox News show yesterday: “This song is about a progressive utopia where there are no owners of anything. We all just share it. It’s made for you — it’s your land, it’s my land. We all have it together. Some people have property now, and some people don’t. We can all think of this song as an American song. Yes, it is — an American progressive song.” Check out his incisive analysis of Guthrie’s progressive folk masterpiece below.

Beck has been sounding out on classic rock a lot this year, according to Media Matters. In January he played the Beatles’ “Revolution” to illustrate how progressives prefer a slow evolution into socialism rather than a violent revolution. “Their [progressives'] idea was you don’t need a bloody revolution. You just evolve things slowly, and you’ll change the world….This is all – it’s peaceful. But it’s progressive.”

And it looks as though a Republican has finally figured out the less-nationalist significance of Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.” After Pat Gray, his radio co-host, declared the song “anti-American”
today, Beck added, “See, here’s the thing that I don’t think people understand yet – I think you do – that it is time for us to wake up out of our dream state, wake up out of the propaganda.”

As one commenter noted, expect Beck to get around to Green Day’s American Idiot in another 20 years or so.

The John Lennon Education Tour Bus is a nonprofit mobile audio and high-def video recording and production facility. The Bus has enlisted some great musicians and producers to inspire students old and young to partake in musical and video projects.

The Bus recently rolled through Palm Springs to visit the TED Conference. Jill Sobule, John Doe, Don Was, and others hopped on to write and record a new song. Add some video know-how from artist Jansen Yee and you have their say on “What the World Needs Now.”

Prudence Mabhena and her band, Liyana, subjects of the Academy Award-winning documentary short Music By Prudence, were on the bus last year. Watch the video they made here.

The uplifting story of Zimbabwean singer-songwriter Prudence Mabhena, 21, who was born severely disabled and has struggled to overcome poverty and discrimination. Read more »