VEMS: Black Lives Matter Fundraiser

The Virtual Electronic Music Summit  (VEMS) takes place online from June 4-7th, 2020. While this event is free to attend, we will be accepting donations all week for Black Lives Matter organizations in North America which is our home. 

All funds donated to the VEMS Black Lives Matter Fundraising campaign will be split evenly between the Black Lives Matter Canada  and Black Lives Matter Global Network . If you wish to donate directly to these organizations, we encourage you to do so.

A message from our founders: 

We created the Virtual Electronic Music Summit to help artists and music businesses navigate the new realities brought forth by COVID-19. The music industry has been decimated by the pandemic and we wanted to provide a platform to share and discuss solutions. Events of the last week has spotlighted a different crisis, one that extends into every facet of life and culture. Anti-Blackness and systemic racism against people of colour has to stop. Black Lives Matter.

While we’re on the eve of our event, we want to use our platform to support this larger goal, while also making available the content and contributions of everyone who has already offered to share their insight and talent as part of VEMS. We’re making some quick changes to help fight systemic racism to the best of our abilities.

1) Our event was always intended to be free. VEMS will now be a by-donation event with full proceeds going to Black Lives Matter groups in Canada and the USA. We hope that those who have the means will pitch in to help create a more just society. 

2) While many of our sessions are focused on music production or technology, we have a number of sessions that will be directly discussing how the music industry must change to address systemic racism. We particularly want to direct your attention to the Re-Building Safer Spaces panel on Sunday. We’ve highlighted those panels on our blog and invite you attend online.

3) We recognize that right now so many of you are focused on the bigger protest and will not wish to tune in to the conference at that time. We get it and we support you. One of the benefits of an online event is that we'll have recorded the entire thing for playback later. We are committed to making the entire event available for free to watch at your leisure after this weekend.

These small actions are our ideas for how we can reorient our scheduled event for more social good. We know it’s probably not enough, so we’re open to feedback and new ideas from our community. Please email [email redacted] to connect with us. We want to support all sides of the music industry. We’ll closely watch and learn from this experience.

To all those on the front lines of this fight, we are with you. Our platform will forever hold space for the conversations and change you are fighting for.

—Isis Graham and Andrew Williams, founders the entire VEMS/AEMCON Team. 

Alberta, Canada