In 146 days, Americans will head to the polls to decide the next president and cast their votes for countless other national and local races and initiatives. Now, several music nonprofits are looking to make the industry’s presence felt on Nov. 5 via the launch of a new voter engagement coalition, Music Votes.
Composed of nonprofits from across the industry, the platform aims to increase voter participation by ensuring that those in the industry, along with music fans, are registered to vote, have the correct form of identification required to vote and show up to vote in person or by mail.
Developed and led by the Music Sustainability Alliance — the group behind the first-ever Music Sustainability Summit held earlier this year — Music Votes is designed to be an easy and high-impact program that can be deployed at scale by artists, music companies, venues and record stores.
Involvement with Music Votes can range from a simple task, like posting voter registration links on social channels or websites, to more involved projects like having artists and their teams help fans and employees check their ID status or working with election night concerts produced by the nonprofit #iVoted. Music Votes will also provide resources for non-partisan information on issues like climate change, disability culture, LGBTQ rights, and racial and reproductive justice.
The initiative will also provide data on where any given artist has the biggest civic impact in a bid to help artists and their teams determine where their efforts will be most useful — a component developed in collaboration with Johns Hopkins University’s SNF Agora Institute.
Music Votes’ 20 coalition partners include #iVoted Concerts, which produces data-driven concerts on election night that anyone can attend by showing a selfie taken outside their polling place or at home with a blank and unmarked ballot; Black Voters Matter; the Environmental Voter Project; the Hip Hop Caucus; REVERB; Rock The Vote; Support + Feed; Music Declares Emergency; and The Ally Coalition.
Music Votes was launched after a group of industry professionals “came together to support each other’s efforts with a focus on simplifying and streamlining how the music industry at large can have the most impact in this high-stakes election,” said MSA board member Kurt Langer in a statement. “Music Votes is the result and we invite the entire industry to join our nonpartisan coalition.”
More information is available at the Music Votes website.
