Banner image: Mike Lroy Mural at Mother Fool’s Coffeehouse, Madison, Wisconsin. Image courtesy of the artist.
Like many of you, the Rabble team has been reeling. We've been scared, we've been stressed, we've been distracted and disturbed by *waves hands at everything*. Turns out global pandemics are a lot to take in.
But, we've also been heartened to see so many people respond to this crisis by stepping up to help. We've seen makers and small businesses spearhead mask making initiatives, community members coordinate support for healthcare workers, and mutual aid organizers rapidly expand their networks. And we've seen public libraries and librarians—the organizations and people we work with—step up to share information, advocate for their colleagues, provide internet access however they can, and transform themselves to serve their most vulnerable community members.
The Rabble team has been looking for ways to help too. Our MUSICat platform is already uniquely designed to leverage public library resources to support and sustain working artists, a population acutely impacted by COVID-19. We immediately started conversations with our library partners to determine how we can empower their institutions to support working artists. Those conversations are ongoing, and we'll be sharing more about our plans to use MUSICat as a lever to help musicians through this crisis in the coming weeks. Before we do, we wanted to take a moment to document Rabble's rapid responses during the first several weeks of this crisis.
Just a few days after most of the country shut down in mid-March, Kelly Hiser rejoined our team on an active full-time basis. As we announced last November, Kelly handed CEO duties over to Preston Austin at the start of 2020, and was getting more involved in the Pittsburgh tech and nonprofit ecosystems while seeking new career adventures. She's put that search on hold to help Rabble, our library partners, and their communities of artists weather the current crisis.
As Kelly shifted back into work with Rabble, we put our heads together to start figuring out how MUSICat could best help artists. We decided to quickly build functionality to support customizable special messaging on all MUSICat sites, and deployed the tool to all library MUSICat sites just a couple days later (see it in action at Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh's STACKS).
As we were working through ideas about MUSICat, we came across a tweet by Danielle Wenner, a philosophy professor at Pittsburgh's Carnegie Mellon University, announcing a Virtual Tip Jar she created for service industry workers whose incomes are evaporating during the pandemic. Philip Crawford and Rabble's CEO Preston Austin quickly replicated Danielle’s tip jar model for Madison workers. Just two weeks later over 7,000 Pittsburgh workers had signed up using Danielle's Google form, and cities and towns across the country had built their own tip jars.
Rabble stepped in as a team along with a few volunteers to create the Tip Your Server (TYS) project to support Virtual Tip Jars by making tipping easier, offering randomly selected people, establishment lists, and adding Venmo and PayPal buttons. Both Pittsburgh's and Madison's Virtual Tip Jars are now running on the TYS code.
Rabble is now digging into the long term work that lays ahead of us. Along with our library partners and the musicians they serve, we face daunting uncertainties: we don't know when we'll leave quarantine, we don't know when libraries will reopen, we don't know when (or which) venues will start booking and hosting shows again.
But we do know some things. We know that many librarians are striving to keep their communities informed, connected, and supported in new ways. We know that musicians are still making music, and navigating new ways to share their music. We know that the revenue musicians make from existing digital streaming services is not enough— it's never been enough, and it's certainly not enough now. We know that musicians need help, and that public libraries are uniquely positioned to provide that help. We're ready to help too. So stay tuned, stay safe, stay home.