EQUAL SOUND IS PROUD TO FISCALLY SPONSOR:

Corona Relief Fund

The Equal Sound Corona Relief Fund was set up on short notice to provide direct financial assistance to musicians who have lost work as a result of Corona-related event cancellations. An FAQ on the fund is at equalsound.org/corona-relief-fund-faq.

Equal Sound Corona Relief Fund flier with stolen background art

Here’s the story:

There’s a worldwide public health crisis on, and organizations left and right are cancelling their events. That’s a responsible thing to do, but musicians, who are often freelancing, are really suffering financially from the lost work. That’s where we come in. As a 501(c)3 we can accept tax deductible donations and put them in a separate fund to pay out to musicians in need who have suddenly had their livelihood dry up.

We are flying by the seat of our pants on this one.

We got this idea after seeing a lot of posts expressing pain and fear and frustration and thought this would be an easy way for us to help. We called our accountant and she said she’d figure out if everyone would need 1099s or what and to just keep track of it all, and then we went to set up this webpage. We welcome your comments and offers of assistance.

Equal Sound is going to keep 1% of these donations for our time and postage stamps and figuring out how to actually make this work in a sustainable way. The payment processor will keep a little too. After that, everything else goes to the fund and then on to the musicians who have applied for relief.

If you’re a musician in need, read this:

We have set up a financial assistance request form. It’s insanely simple because means testing is a great way to keep people from getting help. Read this, then fill it out.

First, to keep things fair and also manageable, we are going to pay out a maximum of $500 per gig on a first-come, first-served basis. This way someone who had a $20,000 gig cancelled doesn’t end up pulling too much from everyone else and we do our best to avoid a tragedy of the commons situation. People with more than one canceled gig can apply more than once, they just have to wait until they receive a payment to apply again.

To apply, you will need three things.

1. Your W9 as a PDF (this tells us where to send the check and how to track it. We might have to 1099 you, we are looking into this).
2. A request amount (max $500 per cancelled gig)
3. A single PDF of evidence of what you were supposed to be paid and proof that the job was canceled as a result of the Coronavirus/Covid-19/if-you’re-reading-this-you-know-what-we’re-talking-about

If you have had more than one gig canceled, you can only apply more than once, but ONLY FOR ONE GIG AT A TIME. So apply to get your place in line, receive payment the moment we’ve got it, and apply again for another canceled gig.

When you’ve got those materials together, CLICK HERE to apply.

IMPORTANT NOTE FOR DONORS
Donations are going through, but for some reason our system is not sending thank you email receipts automatically.
We are working with our software/payment processor people to fix this
We have all the records, and payments have been processed successfully, and we will send your appropriate receipts the second we have this fixed.
Sorry for the hassle. This has been a crazy couple days.

Donate today!

Donations to Equal Sound are tax deductible to the extent of the law. Equal Sound keeps a very small administrative fee in return for handling the accounting and extending our nonprofit status to our fiscally-sponsored projects so that they may collect donations. If you have any questions, email info@equalsound.org.