$2Billion for the Arts; Will the US Follow in the UK’s Footsteps?
The UK government announces they're gonna give 2 billion to the arts community. What will the US do?
For all you new folks here, we always highlight a little artist to the day before I get into the nitty gritty, and today's artist is one of my favorite songwriters that is on the planet today, in his name is John Moreland. His breakout record was a record called High on Tulsa Heat, which featured a song called Cherokee that I absolutely fell in love with. Since then, he's released a ton of different records and his latest one, LP 5 is quickly becoming my favorite of his entire catalog. I was really excited to see John in Atlanta this year earlier. I think he was coming to terminal West around February. And of course, that show got cancelled because the rest of the world got cancelled around the end of February, early March, so I guess I'll have to wait to see him for the first time. One of my favorite videos of John was at his performance during his first records tour called Break My Heart Sweetly, and it's just like a super painful love, heart tearing ballad that you just gotta listen to... John has one of those voices that when you listen to him, you just feel like he's already had three or four lives, his voice is kinda gravely, and it just seems like he's already lived through everything. When you find a moment in your day... Check out John Moreland.
Okay, so here we are. I am super excited to talk about this today because I feel like it is sort of the groundbreaking deal that everybody in the music world has been waiting for, and someone finally did it, which means maybe it then carries over to other countries. The UK Government announced that they're gonna give almost 2 billion to a variety of people within the arts and music community. It's rather interesting timing because I feel like this could be a domino effect that could filter into other countries that are of, say, UK status and have the ability in which to do so, the economic relief applies to theaters, museums, live music venues, and other cultural institutions, a whole bunch of music venues came together as music venues trust, which started some hashtags that really got the attention of the local government, I guess enough people with the hashtag, #saveourvenues, posted enough times to get the attention of the local government in the UK and brought this to their parliament. Also in the last couple of weeks, there's a hashtag that emerged called #letmusicplay, which was really backed by a whole bunch of famous UK artists.
So this huge stimulus package they just passed is absolutely ridiculous.
Let's break down the numbers. 270 million pounds were issued in loans, and over 880 million pounds were given in the form of grants that will not need to be paid back. That is a lot of money. So of this money, there'll be 115 billion pounds that would be sort of acting as a central hub or fund for all of the other branches, 100 million of those pounds will go towards the cultural institutions that sort of represent the history of England. Another 120 million pounds are gonna go towards restarting construction, and some of the sites that had stopped these sites are obviously cultural and music and arts related. And finally, 97 million will go to Scotland, 59 million will go to Wales, and 33 million will go to Northern Ireland. That's a lot of money for our government to invest into music, arts culture, etcetera, especially when it seems like there's so many other critical things that could have gotten that money. Now wait, I'm not criticizing this at all, I think this is a really awesome thing that the UK did, and it makes me wonder what America is going to do for its arts community? Is there any money left? Even for the arts community, I don't know.
When I applied for a PPP loan through my local bank for my businesses that are in the artist and music sort of community, I was told that there was a waiting list of over 200,000 people in my area waiting for a loan, and that the first round of the PPP only serviced about 30,000 or 40,000, and there was still 150,000 to 200000 more to serve before likely, I would get my name called. So in my business, I decided that that was probably not going to be of the best interest, mostly because they kept changing the terms after they would give people the money, it's really easy to be frustrated with our government and our Congress and our president, and everyone sort of attached to everything about how this pandemic is being handled, but truthfully, there's not really any one person or regime that would have been able to handle such a crisis smoothly and without any hiccup at all, so while we sit and we wait for all of our businesses to be satisfied with loans and all sorts of aid, which seemingly isn't really getting to all the people that we need to get it to, I just wonder what is gonna happen with the artist community, and is there anything like this even in the works currently in my own backyard of Atlanta, we're watching music venues really struggled to get by or not even reopen at all, just because of the restrictions of the capacity, my hope is, is that there's some sort of plan of action that's in the works, and that will take care of the people that need it the most.
Assuming that America does have something in the works for this, I just hope that they have one thing in mind, that simple thing is the actual people that are out there working in the arts community, what I don't wanna see is this money be budgeted to colleges or any sort of extracurricular degree program that won't really help the musicians that are out there that are not working... If something like this is to be done, I hope that it at least qualifies as someone filing their taxes as a musician or an artist or a photographer, any of these types of creative people would be eligible for this grant. So your move, America, what are you gonna do? I'm tired of seeing my friends in the artist community suffer, I think it's time you did something, so until we hear some sort of good news through this whole thing, I'd like to issue a special challenge to all my artist friends to keep creating, writing, composing, recording, whatever it is that you do in your field. Keep doing it, triple down on yourself, your brand, who you are, who you wanna be when you come out of this, it'll keep your head in a great... It'll keep your heart in a great place and it will guide you through this tough time.