The Future of Music wants to Help You Help Yourself!

Note from Brian: We are big supporter of our friends at The Future of Music Coalition. Jenny Toomey and her team are working to solve the overwhelming problem of Health Insurance for Indenpendent artists and writers. The first stage in their research is a simple and short survey which I hope all of you will take a moment to fill out.

From: Jenny Toomey-Executive Director of the Future of Music

Hi folks. The Future of Music Coalition is taking baby steps towards figuring out ways to help more musicians get better health care for less money, and we need five minutes of your time.

Our first goal is to quantify the musician/insurance landscape. As musicians ourselves we know the lack of health insurance is a big problem, but before we start talking to insurance companies and legislators we need some hard numbers. From March 15 - June 30, 2002 the FMC is conducting an online survey to better understand musicians’ experience with health insurance coverage. The survey is posted here:

http://www.futureofmusic.org/research/healthsurvey.cfm

Please feel free to fill it out yourself or preview the questions. It just takes a couple of minutes.

More importantly, we're hoping you can help us spread the word about the survey's existence to your network of musicians, songwriters, and artists by posting a short notice in your newsletter, providing a link on your website, or just sending out a little email to your rocker friends.

Helpful items:

A link to a button you can add on your site:
http://www.futureofmusic.org/images/hsbutton2.gif

A link to a banner you can add to your site:
http://www.futureofmusic.org/images/hsbanner.gif

A PDF postcard you can attach to an email, or for printing to make copies:
http://www.futureofmusic.org/images/healthinspostcard.pdf


A message you can send to your community, although this stuff always
works better if there's a note from you:
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From March 15 - June 30, 2002 the Future of Music Coalition is conducting an online survey to better understand musicians’ experience with health insurance coverage.

We need your participation! Whether you're a full-time rocker, a songwriter, a studio musician, or a part-time enthusiast, were interested in your experience with health insurance. Please visit this page to answer this short survey (it takes about ten minutes):

http://www.futureofmusic.org/research/healthsurvey.cfm

...and tell your musician and songwriting friends to visit the site as well! The data will be analyzed and reported in July-August 2002.

The Future of Music Coalition is a not-for-profit collaboration between leading musicians and experts from the worlds of technology, public policy and intellectual property law. The FMC seeks to educate the media, policymakers, and the public about music / technology issues, while also bringing together key stakeholders in an effort to come up with creative solutions to some of the challenges in this space. The FMC also aims to identify and promote innovative business models that will help musicians and citizens benefit from new technologies.

Find out what else we’re working on by visiting our site:

http://www.futureofmusic.org
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The success of this research project depends on how many musicians complete the survey, and we're hoping that thousands do so we have a rich data set that captures the full diversity of musicians and songwriters. We're also urging survey respondents to forward us any personal stories regarding health insurance and health care they're willing to share publicly, so that the data fits within a context of human experience.

We are simultaneously working on other avenues of outreach, including posting to news groups, flyering at music events and in record shops, contacting booking agents and bands on tour, and running PSAs on college radio. If you can think of any other organizations or groups that would be interested in this project, please let us know.

When the survey is complete, the FMC will analyze the data and report the findings publicly. We hope that this survey can be a catalyst to create a broader and more results-oriented discussion about workable health insurance solutions for the music community. We thank you in advance for your support!

Jenny Toomey
Executive Director
The Coalition for the Future of Music
jenny@futureofmusic.org
www.futureofmusic.org
202.518.4117

Brian Austin Whitney
Founder
Just Plain Folks
jpfolkspro@gmail.com
Skype: Brian Austin Whitney
Facebook: www.facebook.com/justplainfolks

"Don't sit around and wait for success to come to you... it doesn't know the way." -Brian Austin Whitney

"It's easier to be the bigger man when you actually are..." -Brian Austin Whitney

"Sometimes all you have to do to inspire humans to greatness is to give them a reason and opportunity to do something great." -Brian Austin Whitney