 I imagine they're trying to get them back. Hi, everybody. I'm Erin McKeown, musician, writer, and producer, and FMC board member. And I can't think of a better segue to get to our last panel of the day than Nicole Atkins' video that you just saw. And our next panel is entirely, as we say, in the ceiling. And I'll go ahead and introduce it while we get them up on the board here. In conversation, Meryl Garbus, Tao Nguyen, Chris Walla, and Jordan Kerlin. In today's social media world, musicians are much more than entertainers. They are activists, educators, and providers of news and information. From disaster relief to election work, building awareness for issues and engaging in philanthropy, artists are redefining what it means to communicate with an audience. Our panel looks back on this election cycle, what excites and concerns them about their activism and reflects on what it means to be an artist and a citizen. So with us, eventually, will be Meryl Garbus, known as Tune Yards, Jordan Kerlin, musician, manager, musician manager at Zeitgeist, artist management, Tao Nguyen, Tao and the Get Down, Stay Down, and Chris Walla, musician and producer from Death Cab for Cutie. And this is a moderated, interviewed, our folks are being talked to by Aaron Potts, the executive director at Air Traffic Control. Hi, Aaron. Can you hear us? I think I can hear you. I think we can hear you, and now we can see all of you. Awesome. We can't see you, so we have no clue what you're wearing today. Nothing quite as nice as you all. So we'll turn it over to you. Thanks. All right, well, I should acknowledge this is a little bit of a funky sort of setup, but we're down for it. We have the five of us here, and we also have an audience of five on the other side of the camera that you can't see. Oh, six. Somebody just walked in. And we are all in San Francisco. The Bay Bridge is right outside of our window. Let's just maybe introduce ourselves quickly. I'm Aaron Potts with Air Traffic Control. I'm Meryl Garbus, Tune Yards. I'm Jordan Kerlin. I run a company here in San Francisco called Psych-Eyes Tardis Management. My name's Chris Walla. I play in a band called Deathcap for Cutie. My name's Tao Nguyen. I've been named Tao in the get down state. Awesome. So we are, I guess, supposed to be talking about the power of music and the role of music in activism and philanthropy and politics. That the role of musicians in these things has been very clear. I gather that you just saw a little bit of what Nicole Atkins is doing around sandy relief, and particularly with her town. Many other musicians are doing lots of benefit events. We've seen musicians going and volunteering, bringing food and water up flights of stairs in Queens and Brooklyn. We also have seen it recently with the elections. And we'll talk a little bit about that, because I think all of us were involved in the elections to some extent. But of note, I think, is that in the last days of the election, when the big guns had to be brought in, it was Bruce and JC that they brought in. It was musicians that were brought in, not other politicians or other leaders of any sort. So this to me really speaks to the power of music. When we think historically about music and social change movements, like the civil rights movement or the women's rights movements, you can understand the power of music. And I think probably also on a personal level, everybody here has probably been deeply affected by music on a personal level. But there's also a lot of market and academic research that talks to the power of music, and particularly where, as I said before, in California. And research came out in California a couple of years ago that showed that music informed young people's identity more so than religion. But it is a more important way of forming one's identity than religion. Biologists have found that music activates the part of the brain that governs optimism. And so when we're talking about the very big and serious problems of the world, it's always good to have optimism activated. Political scientists have also found that musicians can help their fans feel engaged and that their engagement can make a difference. These are the two most important things that actually make a change happen. And then another study found that people registered to vote in 2008 at concerts were more likely to vote than other groups and also were more likely to not have been reached by other organizations. So musicians have this huge role to play in activating those people. The other thing to point out, I think, is that through live audience, through social media, that musicians have a much bigger audience than most social justice organizations. The Sierra Club has half a million people on an email list. And bands, bigger bands, have millions of people on email lists. And similarly with social media, if you compare social media, I think Obama had 1.5 million on Twitter, and Usher has 5.5 million. So just to show you the scale of it. So all that is to say, there is a huge, there is a lot of power in being a musician who wants to engage in music, in activism, or philanthropy, or politics. So I wanted to ask the panelists to just talk briefly about some of the opportunities and challenges that they've seen in their personal experiences with music and activism or music and politics. Carol, will you go first? Sure. I'll get this out of the way soon. Well, first I just want to say I'm going to spooch up closer as a mic, because we're sort of mic-less here. It's very new to me that I want to say thank you for those who got me on this panel, because this is really new to me to make social activism an active part of my music life. And I think it's been mind-blowing in this past year of seeing how much access I have to human beings. So for a long time, I disregarded Facebook and Twitter. And I was sort of like, I can't handle that. I can just handle being on tour and essentially running my own business and doing the professional part of being a musician. And then low and behold today, I have, I think, 18.8,000, a little number of help. I might have looked it up just now, 18.8,000 Twitter followers. And that's something I'm laughing at myself too, because I don't keep track of that stuff. But all of a sudden, other people have brought those things with my attention. So let's see. In the past couple of years, all of a sudden, I've had resources. Not only can I actually make a living with my music, but now I'm actually making more than my living in music. And I have options to use some of my own financial resources, but more importantly, my access to people, to raise money for causes that I believe in, and more importantly, to draw attention to the things I believe in. So I have this band called Two Nards. A lot of Two Nards music is influenced by African music. And I guess to me at a certain point, I don't feel good unless I don't feel good about my work unless I'm bringing attention to all of what my music is made up of. So if I say, oh yeah, I use this yodeling technique from Central Africa, or this Congolese song really influenced me, then how much further do I have to go to say what's happening in Congo right now? There are huge human rights atrocities happening there, genocides happening there that here we don't hear a lot of. So how can I, as a musician, really connect my music and connect my fans with, we can call it activism, but really it's just sort of reality, the truth of what's actually happening, honesty. And I guess I'll just say quickly that something that I just experimented with for the election was posting Twitter forums for my fans, many of whom I think are young people, many of whom are women, many of whom it turns out are conservative voters and asking both progressive, liberal, and conservative voters to have conversations about things that were on their ballots. So that to me was the first time that I had really engaged and really there were some heated conversations on those Twitter forums that apparently hit a lot of people. It's hard to know when you're just tweeting things, what's happening, but really a lot of people saw and perhaps were engaged and perhaps got more information. Or if nothing else, they know that I care enough about the election to go out and vote. And anyway, that was a really fascinating experience. Before, can I just jump in before you go to say that my husband is live fact checking me? And in fact, Obama now has 23.2 million followers on Twitter, but Romney has 1.7 and Biden has 343,000. So, so the point, take Obama out, the point's also there. I think he'll still have fact checking is great. I was gonna say your Obama number sounded, I don't know. It's good to know I'm right on the heels of Joe Biden with my 630 followers. He does. He does. So, I am now an artist, although I am very interested in learning how to Yodel influenced by Central African. You got it. That's the next channel. Thank you. But as a manager, it's, I feel fortunate in that I'm not a big fan of Yodel, but I'm not a big fan of Yodel. I'm not a big fan of Yodel. I'm not a big fan of Yodel. I'm not a big fan of Yodel. In that, you know, I myself am very interested in activism and doing what I can to be involved in causes and that I believe in. And I'm fortunate that a number of my clients, including the two sitting to my right, Chris and Tal, are interested as well. So, a lot of what happens on our end, whether it's being contacted by a client saying, hey, we're feeling very passionate about this and we wanna get involved with the best way in. Or on the other side, which happens a little bit, less frequently being contacted by an organization saying, hey, we're trying to raise awareness for fracking in the state of New York and going out to our clients and figuring out who might be interested in getting involved on that end. You know, a lot of our job at that point is to figure out, help our clients figure out the best, most effective way of doing their part. And, you know, for me, it's exciting because obviously, even though I do have that overwhelming number of Twitter followers, my clients tend to have a much larger soapbox, much taller soapbox to stand on. Than I do. And, you know, we have been, you know, death cap for QD in particular has been very, very active over the last three presidential elections. And, you know, it can be anything from, you know, working with, you know, headcounts or other organizations to do voter registration at shows, which, as Aaron pointed out, can be very, very effective. A very effective way to, you know, helping, you know, in whatever way we can with Chris's efforts to actually go out and knock on doors in swing states and be, you know, involved on a much more direct level. So I don't, you know, I think that, you know, fortunately there's a lot of great resources available these days, whether it's air traffic control, which Aaron runs, or future music coalition to figure out, you know, Aaron, the best way it, you know, it saves a lot of time because it's very, very overwhelming to figure out, okay, hey, we want to do something, you know, X client wants to do something to aid, you know, victims from Superstorm Sandy. And, you know, it would obviously be a much larger task for us to go out and research and figure out what's the best organization who's doing the most effective work, et cetera, who's not overloaded, et cetera, et cetera. So having resources out there now that weren't really even available, you know, 10 years ago has made our jobs a whole lot easier. Yeah. Yeah, so, you know, I started pointing out in the last, in the last three presidential cycles, my band, Death Capricuity, has been involved sort of at different velocities and amplitudes in the process of getting progressive candidates selected at, you know, the state level and then with presidential campaigns. But one of the things that we have always tried to do is get voters registered wherever and whenever we can and through, you know, primarily through Headcount, has been really responsive and easy to work with and has proven to be really effective just in getting people registered, sorry, wherever we go. And the thing for me, my big passion in all of this is, so I grew up in Seattle in the 90s and I was, I guess I was 16 in the year that Grunge broke in Seattle in like 1991 and I wasn't really able to even, growing up in Seattle, I wasn't even really able to engage in the scene that was happening in my city because there was a thing on the books called the Teen Dance Ordinance that basically provided that the cops of the city of Seattle, a wildcard, to be able to shut down any all-ages show. It was basically an ordinance that was full of unmeanable conditions. If you were meeting one, you were necessarily in violation of another part of the statute. And I was really frustrated as a kid who was just getting into rock and roll that I couldn't even go see these bands that I was seeing on TV and reading about The Rolling Stone in my own community. And so I started going to city council meetings as the conversation was starting to brew about how to rewrite or repeal the Teen Dance Ordinance and I mean as a, as a loud 16-year-old, I may have been more harmed than I actually was good at city council meetings, but nonetheless, I got the feeling in doing that that there was something to it, that there was something to just showing up, just representing myself. And the thing that when I get to talk to our fans in person or when I'm working on a campaign or going door-to-door or talking with college students on campus about the process of being involved, I talk a lot about representation, about how it is a representative democracy and so much of it is simply representing yourself, how we are the representation. And that's sort of my passion, it's just to try and try and impart that however I can, it's just to remind people that whatever happens in your city or county or state or in your country, it's all at some, in some way or another, it is those decisions all get made and those candidates get elected because you say something or do not say something. And sometimes that gets lost, particularly in an era where government seems to be a bad word and public investment or public infrastructure or any public program has sort of taken on this, it's so often said with kind of a sneer and there's so many sort of different versions of tax revolts happening right now. And I just think it's really important to remind people that this is our government and these are our tax dollars and as progressives, we have a stake in how those resources end up getting engaged or used and what they end up getting engaged and used for. So that's sort of, I guess that's about where I come in. I guess I'll talk a little bit about just sort of my entrance into taking more concerted role with my activism through my music and let's see. Well, when I was in college, I had a different plan and I was my goal or my objective was to become a social worker of sorts and go into women's advocacy. And then I somehow ended up playing music and then that seemed, to be honest, I wasn't gonna make it in that line of work because it was such an emotional toll to take, I think, every day because I worked at a women's shelter while I was in school and I just knew that I didn't have the constitution for it. But in the pursuit of music, I grappled a lot with how self-involved it can become and I tried to promise myself that I wouldn't, I would make room and it would be, the things I cared about would be just as important as music or trying to make a living at music and I've been fortunate enough to do so to combine both and I think that's in no small part to air traffic control and Erin didn't ask me to say that. I'll tell you right now, anywhere to anyone. And also, so that as Jordan stated, the resources that air traffic control or the Future of Music Coalition can provide a musician is invaluable and the way that it's applied on a really practical level I think is incredibly helpful to us and an example of that is adding a dollar surcharge to every ticket in every city at every show. And what we've been able to do in previous tours and what we'll always try to do for any tour coming up is that you can, and ATC has helped us get in touch with whatever organization aligned with whichever cause we choose in whatever city and those folks come to the show and then they go home with that money or the money that's made in their community stays in that community and it's an opportunity to meet these folks who, one of the last tours I went on it was all folks who worked with domestic violence victims and then, and also victims with childhood sexual abuse. So you get these amazing, amazing advocates to come to the show just to say thank you. And that was probably my favorite part of the night was to just meet these people and say thanks and hopefully give them a night off and they can go hang out. They didn't have to, like my band or have never heard of it. Shady of drink tickets, whatever makes it worth the trip. But anyway, we get to say hi and then we get to let the folks know that the people at the show that they're this incredible resource in their community and so that's an example. And as far as challenges that I've run into and I think all of us have run into this is the age old question why don't you just play music? Which are people who are disgruntled that you're talking about anything at least bit politically charged or that your tweets or your posts or your shows come with what you believe in. And I think, well, I have to stifle my first reaction because I don't think it's productive but I've been thinking about it lately and I think that that's such an example of how music will reach corners that will otherwise be unreachable. So anyone who's upset, it's just an opportunity I suppose. And if not, then at least you know that there's a sort of a commonality where you never thought there could be one before. That may say something. Yes, you may say something. And then we're gonna take questions so people get ready with some questions. I think that something that's interesting too and that you touched on it a little bit, Meryl is outside of the show experience now, obviously there is this medium or mediums that musicians have which is still relatively new because it used to be come to the show and you might hear Bruce Springsteen talking from the stage about a cause or obviously going much further back than that. Now with Twitter and Facebook and Friendster and all that stuff, you get there is this medium now where you can communicate with your fans not only directly and you don't have to all be in a room together but also communicate with them. It's frequently as like you want them. I get Russell Simmons tweets and they're often about political stuff but he tweets about like 40 times a day about meditation which is great. And you don't have to read it if you don't want but I mean how has that changed? I know you're not on any social networks right now because it has been in the past but how has that changed for you guys and have you figured out a way that you can best utilize it to communicate with your fans? We've talked about this a fair amount at retreats that we've been on and sort of trying to strike the balance to negotiate how to spread whatever word you'd like to spread but also knowing that you might jeopardize somebody's, dare I say, fellowship or whatever. I don't know. I like fellowship. I like fellowship. Just a cycle. Yeah, yeah. So I got this robe on. So and then it's silly almost to have to think about it but I guess this is just the territory but I think that we've discussed this, Aaron and I in a group setting but to give of yourself on a personal level in what we're assuming just as I would follow whoever because I enjoyed their work and there's that sort of human connection that you want or you follow comedian because they're funny. So they got to be funny sometimes or else why? So to strike that balance between talking about innocuous personal things and giving that bit of yourself is sort of to trade for the opportunity and the ability to convey something that is of more substance for you. So what does that mean in real life? Talk about who is it that says they talk about their cat and then they say something political. You know, you don't have that balance. I don't have cat. Wait for breakfast. Yeah, wait for breakfast. I didn't have a chicken named Jennifer. Put a tooth in that. All right, everyone, follow Tau on Twitter. I like this one. She had a chicken named Jennifer. All right, Erin, can you hear us? Yeah, yeah. Bracey, this is really strange. Is it a strange for you? Is it is for us? Probably. Potentially. Is it potentially? But I think it's kind of working. I don't know. We will look at the evaluations afterwards and decide if this is a innovation we'll repeat at FMC 13. I do want to see if we have some questions here from the audience. Oh, we got a hand and you have to guess the voice. If we won't identify the speaker, you're going to have to guess who it is. Hi. No, I'm just, I actually have a question for Jordan. I'm wondering, it's not a question. It's a request for you to talk about the project you did around the election and getting people to talk about, yes, about 99 issues. 90 days, 90 reasons. 99 is Jay-Z. This is the other. 99 problems. Well, I'll be very brief. But so in August, Dave Eggers, the author Dave Eggers, and I have launched a project called 90 Days, 90 Reasons, which was essentially fueled largely by a trip I had to Chicago in July, where I was talking to Mr. That story was going to be so good, too. Oh. OK, so I guess what that means is we'll be back at FMC 13 with a hangout for the end of that story. Does that mean we get to go to the cocktail party now? I'll take this moment then to cut it before we get back on. We have lovely evaluation forms. Please, please, please go to the registration table on the way out, fill out a form. It helps us produce awesome events just like this one and others. And also, we take good constructive criticism. We take your advice. So please remember to do that. And also, I was going to say thank you to our sponsor, Google, for making the office space in San Francisco available and for Google Hangout. But as we know, this isn't Google's fault. So. Are we back? Yay. So then the secret service will be out of the block. Yay. We didn't have to wait till 2013 to hear it. OK, hurry before we lose you again. OK, cool. So long story longer. So we launched this thing at the beginning of August. And the whole concept was how do we do something that's not going to take people of interest, meaning celebrities, musicians, actors, comedians, novelists, et cetera. How can we get them to do something fairly quickly? We can get it up online quickly and start getting people to really have a dialogue about the election that we felt like was missing that would be appealing to younger demographic. And that's what we did. So we launched it, I don't remember the exact date, but two weeks after, we came up with the idea. And I remember it being one day out, and we had all these commitments and had a single essay in. And I was like, Dave, we need to push this back. Maybe it should be 75 days. And he said, no, we've already announced it. We're going to do it. And one of my clients bailed us out, raciously, Ben, from Deathcap wrote about marriage equality. And then it just started rolling. So we actually pulled out. We ended up posting 110 reasons in 90 days. And it was great. And we got a lot of folks interested. We ended up posting some on Huffington Post as well. BET.com came to us and ended up posting a lot of them. And I think that the timing that we put it up in August, when it wasn't really, the dialogue wasn't quite there, it was really after I feel like the conventions that people really started to engage in the election, I think it helped maybe jumpstart it a little bit. So that was it. And it was a lot of fun to do. And I was really happy when it was over. We have another question from the audience. Hi, I won't make you guess my voice. This is Rebecca Gates. And I just wanted to know if you guys would talk a little bit about what makes it work for you to make this work a priority in your schedule. I know that we all have good intentions. And a lot of people can act on those and others can't. And if there's sort of some secrets you might share with other musicians in terms of how this fits into your schedule and et cetera. Tao, go first. I'll go first. I think what I do, well, I live in San Francisco and I've been fortunate enough to get involved. Well, still you drew that a year off, so that helped. And so this upcoming album cycle, I'm not quite sure how that will happen, aside from organizing the tours around and routing, routing the tours in the beginning in conjunction with ABC has helped a lot. Because so now we can take a day off in DC and in Arizona and New Orleans and try to get organized with folks that we've met through them to do whatever we can. But I think what's been most important to me is that it's one of the only things that helps me feel like I'm a part of the community. I do prison reform stuff in San Francisco and in the state prison in Chakshila. And the people that I've met and worked with have become a really important part of my life. And so I think that that's a privilege that I have, that when I come home, there's this organization that I am a part of. And it's not necessarily for their benefit, it's for mine. So I think that how I can make time for it is because otherwise I would definitely feel that loss. And I think that our lives are so transient that it is a true privilege to have something that sort of is a home base. And luckily, it's flexible enough that they understand if I have to go away for a tour or whatever. But when I come home, I can always go see these folks and help out. Yeah, if I can lay on this too. I am right at the point that I was really starting to want to get more politically involved and just sort of engage more with causes and just whatever I was thinking about and trying to figure out how to ask questions and how to get there and how to commit the time to it. There seems to be like a, I mean, I certainly have this fear of not committing completely. And this fear of if I'm not all the way in it and I can't get to everything or if I can't meet a cause. And in my case, at that time, it was a pita I was interested in. And I was not totally, I was feeling a little weird because it's like, well, I'm a vegetarian but I have a leather belt. Can I help the cause or whatever? And it was about that same time that I met Billy Bragg at a lunch that was organized at South by Southwest in Austin. This was like 2006, I think. And I was, I mean, he's such a kind of a political musical icon. And I was asking, there were a couple of questions in a row and mine was one of them that happened about absolution and the absolution of commitment and experience. And the thing that he said changed my life forever. And the quote, his little soundbite was, not everyone can give it the full bono. Which I thought was such an amazing way to sum up that idea that if you're concerned and you don't know where to start, it's enough that you're concerned. And it's enough that you're aware about it and that you want to move forward and that you're asking questions. And the thing that happens is that as you continue to ask questions and as you continue to get the support of whoever is around you, you figure out where you fit in. And you figure out how loud you can make your, you find the size of the room with your voice just by speaking up and figuring it out. And so, you know, back to the specific question, there's, I mean, I have found myself with a lot of time in the last, since we wrapped up our tour cycle in, what was it, August? September? Yeah, it's been like three or four months. And I have been largely practically unemployed. And so what better time for me to, you know, I have the luxury to be able to give everything I have to this at the moment through the end of the election season. And then for me moving forward, it's digging into Senate rules reform until the next Senate gets sworn in in January. But yeah, I mean, there's sort of no, there's really no right answer. I love that thing about, I'm not everybody can give it the full ball now. So. Can I say one thing? Just that I have had the, there's a wrong way experience. Perhaps that has been a lot more than I've had, that there's a right way. So, so far, I mean, first of all, ATC, that's, it's such an easy thing. Like, you know, to, to sort of set things in motion and not spend a whole lot of time, but then say, yeah, a dollar a ticket is going to this organization. That's, I'm not doing anything. That's just happening. Thanks to ATC. So, and I haven't gotten to do that yet. So that there are things that I see in the future that will make things a lot easier. I think that for me also, it's concentrating on two or three, you know, specific issues that I sort of want to dedicate my life to. And those things are becoming clear. But I recently had an experience of trying to, trying to help a, you know, help a cause in a really rushed way on a tour. And it was a disaster. I mean, disaster upon disaster. And it didn't have to be a disaster. Had it been something that I was really knowledgeable about, had it been something that, that I had spent a couple of months really researching and had done it in a right way, you know, it would have been totally different. But I think that it's a great question. How do you fit this stuff in? And I think, you know, one of the things I came to is like, well, don't try to fit too much in. You know, I mean, just, just sort of once up at a time. And, and that, that the answers do, I think sort of become clearer as we, as we go on. I may say something to seven, sweet link notes over here. You know, the ticketing surcharge, although it is a very simple thing. It is, it's, it's important. And it's not, you know, what's interesting about that is, the ticketing surcharge originally, when kind of fan club ticketing became a popular thing, it was a way for bands to make a little bit more money. So you could say, okay, well, we're setting the surcharge now as opposed to tick a master. So we could say we're gonna charge an extra dollar, two dollars, and that's gonna be better for our bottom line. So it actually is a big deal for an artist to say, you know what, you know, whether it's $3,000 or $30,000 from a tour, I'm donating that rather than putting it into, you know, into our profits. So, but I also think too, with, you know, from where I sit and even, you know, going back to the 90 days, 90 reasons thing, you know, was sort of like, you know, that was a way to navigate, you know, what's the entry point? People are having a hard time figuring out what the entry point about the dialogue, into the dialogue about the election was. And I think it's that way about activism and general. And there are some really simple ways to do it. I mean, you might not think of yourself as an environmentalist, but you know what? You could tell your writers, say, you don't want any bottle of water on tour. You just want, you know, you know, you're going to carry a lot of bottles around and you're going to have, you know, big things of water backstage. You know, could be visiting women soldiers, which you guys have done, you know, doing the USO tour when you're in DC, it could be going into, you know, children's hospitals going on tour and playing a couple songs for the kids. I think, you know, those are, you know, you know, it kind of comes in all shapes and sizes and just some random thoughts I was having as I was seeing you guys talk. So we have on ATC's website, we have a lot of these resources on, you know, if you want to tour with a lesser ecological impact, we have 10 things that you can do, which start as easily as, you know, no water bottles and go all the way down to helping mitigate, helping encourage your fans to use public transit or carpooling or biking even to get to and from your shows because their transportation is actually 80 to 90% of the carbon emissions on your tour. And we've done with many artists, how included some work around that with our Go Green mobile app. But we have lots of sort of DIY tools and strategies that are documented on our website. The website is atctower.net. And there's also a lot of information right now. I know a lot of people are concerned about Sandy. I know you watched some of the footage at the beginning of this, that Nicole Atkins has been working on. There's a blog post about how you can help Sandy and lots of issue work that if you're trying to figure out, if you're a musician or managing a musician and trying to figure out what the entry point is, as Jordan said, that's a good place to start. And then ATC is here. We are free resource to musicians and their managers on any issue. So if you're just thinking about it, trying to figure it out, call us. That's what we're here for. And as these folks have said, there are some strategies that can be used and there's not a single cookie cutter approach that fits for every band, but there's lots of things to try. So we are here to help you try. So then more questions, Bracey. We're done with questions. It's Lyssa and I just wanna thank you all. That was a fantastic session. Even with our hiccups, we were able to capture everything. So thank you all so very much. We appreciate it. And Erin, just to close off, like Erin said, there are no cookie cut methods for anything, whether it's artist activism or certainly how we navigate as musicians and supporters of musicians in this digital marketplace as we saw today. So I wanna thank everybody in San Francisco, everybody online, everyone here at the New America Foundation and Open Society Institute for some really engaging dialogue. FMC continues to provide this important forum for discussion about issues which are at the intersection of music technology and policy, issues that impact artists' lives, issues that impact all of our lives. And I just wanted to close on a couple of things. And a good friend of ours on Facebook just reminded me too, how FMC started. We started 12 years ago by musicians, artists' advocates, technologists, and legal experts. And 12 years later, we continue to do this work to ensure musicians have a voice, have a voice on the issues that affect their livelihood as we heard today. Our activities are rooted in the real world experiences and ambitions of these working musicians. And these perspectives are often overlooked and have historically been overlooked in policy debates but the last 10 years and certainly this past year we've seen it. We certainly commend all of the artist activists that have been part of our extended network and family along with their traffic control. We're guided by our firm conviction that public policy has real impact on the lives of musicians and fans. And we had a manifesto that we did in 2000. And a lot of the core issues around that remain true today. And I promise you, I'm not gonna hold you much more hostage but I'm just gonna capture a few of these. What do we do? We draw together the strongest voices in technology and independent music communities to address issues. The artist is always at its core. The voices of musicians whose art has built an industry cannot be drowned out. Idealists can no longer be locked into opposing sides of an issue that profoundly affect all of our communities both as musicians, consumers and fans. And we all must work together. So thank you again for an awesome summit. And thank you for participating for all the folks online. So we're gonna say good night and thank you very much or good afternoon to all of you online. And then for all of us here at New America Foundation it's time for a party. So that said, we have a closing party at Gibson Guitar Showroom. It's sponsored by MailChimp. So please join us in Chinatown at the front desk. We have directions for those of you that need to know how to get to Gibson Guitar Showroom. The party's hosted by MailChimp. We have Tito's vodka, Sprinkles Cupcakes, Pop Chips, DC, Kombucha, Taylor's Gourmet, Hand Pies, Vita Water and Flying Dog Beer. It's all on the house. There's limited capacity. So please head right over because we wanna make sure you get in. And then also most importantly, please fill out an evaluation form. It's very important for us. And also please consider making a donation to the Future of Music Coalition. We were so delighted and thrilled that we were able to present this e-summit, this summit to you for free. As you all know, it takes a lot to produce these events and I'm incredibly grateful to all of you for coming. But know that this was a free event thanks to our sponsors. But we really could appreciate a contribution. No contribution is too small. So please donate futureofmusic.org back slash donate. Okay, thanks everybody.