Make Music Day will be happening on 21 June across the world. Unlike traditional music festivals, Make Music Day is an open invitation for everyone to make music anywhere and everywhere. We hope to be taking over the streets with music on 21 June, but if we can’t, we invite you to join one of the online Make Music Day initiatives that will take place no matter what.

Workers face significant challenges in building collective power in an industry that depends on their atomization. How do you beat companies that can spend hundreds of millions of dollars to exempt themselves from labor law? Despite the obstacles, gig workers across the world are beginning to answer these questions. As the platform companies push back against organizing efforts, workers are finding each other and developing a transnational network of resistance over forums, groupchats, and video calls.

WE'VE BEEN THROUGH A CHALLENGING PANDEMIC. HEAR OUR VOICES AND REMEMBER WHAT WE'VE BEEN THROUGH

More than two months after passage of federal legislation promising funds to concert venues shuttered for nearly a year by COVID, those businesses haven’t come close to receiving any aid or even seen rules to apply for the grants.

Meanwhile, $3.5 million in state funding for Michigan’s entertainment establishments is getting a little closer this week to disbursement, based on recommendations made by the Michigan Independent Venue and Promoter Association.

The older fiddlers and rhythm guitar players don’t rely on sheet music, so their weekly jam sessions — now on hiatus — are critical to passing their technique to the next generation.

In an abandoned general store along a nearly deserted country road, Alvie Dooms, 90, and Gordon McCann, 89, played rhythm guitar. Nearly a dozen more musicians, many of them also older adults, joined in on fiddle, mandolin, banjo and upright bass. Their tunes had names like “Last Train Home,” “Pig Ankle Rag” and “Arkansas Traveler.”

It would hardly seem necessary to state: A life in the arts — in a theater, in a studio, at a writing desk, on a film crew — constitutes honest-to-goodness work. And yet planting this truism in America’s consciousness has proved such a thorny challenge that a whole new labor movement has been spawned to drive it home. Built on the concept of the “arts worker” — an immense labor category representing 8.8 million Americans doing everything from designing clothing to sweeping museum floors — this movement asserts that the arts are as foundational as farming or manufacturing.

The Mixed Earner Unemployment Compensation benefit is designed to provide financial assistance to gig workers, freelancers, and other self-employed individuals who were unintentionally left out of the federal Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program due to technically qualifying for traditional state unemployment. 

You qualify if you meet these criteria:

1). Are you getting traditional unemployment insurance from your state? If you are receiving benefits from the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance, you do not qualify.

If you’re in the business of creating, performing, or recording music, there are steps you can take to make the most of your year-end gear purchases and potential tax deductions. But you need to wrap these up by December 31 to be able to claim them on your tax return, so you’ll want to plan your purchases now.

Take a look at the links below; they offer lots of useful information.

Scott Hammontree, managing partner for Grand Rapids’ The Intersection, said the new trade group – Michigan Independent Venue and Promoter Association (MIVPA) – gives promoters and music venues “a collective voice” as they scramble for survival.

“Our venues and fans have made enough noise to get the attention of some legislators,” he said. “We hope the new organization and lobbying efforts help complete a bridge to the other side of this.”