In just 10 days, the ‘Together at Home’ series has already featured John Legend, Chris Martin, Camila Cabello & Shawn Mendes, Jennifer Hudson, Miguel, Hozier, Niall Horan, H.E.R., Common and dozens of others.
If you’re a big music fan, there’s a good chance you’ve seen more live music in the last week or two than you have in months. That’s if we put “live” in quotes, anyhow, and allow it to apply to the sudden phenomenon of pop-up web concerts that have replaced the local venue experience in the brief time since every stadium, theater and club in the country got shut down due to the pandemic.
While hundreds of artists have independently taken to their own social media accounts to connect with fans with acoustic performances, the vast majority of live-streams from big-name artists since March 16 have fallen under a single banner – that of the Global Citizen organization’s ‘Together at Home’ program. In just nine days, Global Citizen has sponsored about 30 real-time performances by the likes of John Legend, Chris Martin, Jennifer Hudson, Niall Horan, Brandy Clark, Hozier, Miguel, Lindsey Stirling, OneRepublic’s Ryan Tedder, Ziggy Marley, Christine and the Queens, Evanescence, Rufus Wainwright and Kirk Franklin, among others. They even made news by spurring the first real joint performance between Shawn Mendes and Camila Cabillio that wasn’t just a one-off. And the ‘Together at Home’ series seems on pace to keep going with about a half-dozen fresh live-streams every day, indefinitely.
The name brand is familiar to fans from the Global Citizen Festival that started in 2012, in international locations that include New York’s Central Park, with Coldplay’s frontman as the fest’s curator, supporting concrete initiatives that support a “vision (of) a world without extreme poverty by 2030.” In some ways, the “Together at Home” series is an even more ambitious undertaking, though it began completely spontaneously.
“It all came together in 48 hours,” explains Hugh Evans, the Australian-bred philanthropist who is the co-founder and CEO of Global Citizen. “We got a phone call from the deputy secretary-general of the United Nations, Amina Mohammed, one evening, and then the following morning got a phone call from Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the head of the World Health Organization, asking for Global Citizen’s immediate assistance. And they asked us if we would reach out to Global Citizen’s artist ambassadors to help launch an urgent campaign in support of the WHO’s efforts to combat Covid-19. That same day, I was in Los Angeles and spoke to Chris Martin, and Chris has been a huge supporter of Global Citizen over so many years, and he said immediately that he wanted to help,” Evans says.
“And so the following day, literally on that Monday (March 16), he decided to go live on Instagram. At midday, we quickly developed a format of how the show would take place and how we would drive the right sorts of calls to action on three big objectives we have for the campaign. He went live, and then all of a sudden it took off. John Legend did the next day, and from there we had just extraordinary support from artists like Camila Cabello and Shawn Mended and Common and Rufus Wainwright. Now, there are artists participating every single day, and it’s creating an extraordinary number of actions that are being taken at globalcitizen.org/coronavirus to drive people on both personal behavioral actions, but also on systemic actions that they can take to tackle coronavirus.”
Source: Variety
