Remote Missions
The Fair Trade Music movement started here in Portland, but has since spread to Los Angeles, Seattle, New Orleans, and among the itinerant singer-songwriters of AFM Local 1000. We get inquiries from all over the world. We encourage everybody to organize a chapter in their city. That happens faster in some places than in others. In the meantime, here is a short list of some ways people can help the cause, regardless of their geographic location:
Remote Missions
Donate
Fair Trade Music currently has funding for one 1/4 time employee. Every little bit helps.
There's a yellow 'donate' button at the bottom of every page.
Nothing trumps rolling up your sleeves and doing some good, old-fashioned organizing.
Click the link above to find out how to find and coordinate with us and your AFM local.
If even a handful of our endorsers were to click through to the endorser tips, and actually do them, it would be very helpful!
Spreading the good word -- especially to musicians -- is a large part of this campaign.
Amplify
our facebook page has hand-picked content and messaging.
If even a handful of our likers clicked "Share" as well, or commented, it would help spread that messaging.
Consider also signing up for and forwarding our newsletter.
Meme Team
Creating clever, memorable, sharable, viral-ready images or slogans, See our images page for some early examples.
An excellent recent example of this was musicans taking picures of themselves giving the Microphone Salute.
Venueology is like 'yelp' for working musicians.
It's a project of AFM Freelance services
It's free to all musicians.
Read and write reviews of local venues in Portland, or other participating cities.
If you don't see your city, ask them to add it!
You'll be helping other musicians in your market, and you might learn something.
Please, keep the reviews as constructive as you can.
Xtranormal movies
"If you can type, you can make a movie."
It's a little more like programming - it basically invovles getting computer/robots to act.
It takes a while, but the results can hilarious, informative, and thus very useful indeed.
We've shared Plumber's Little Helper and I'd rather be the dishwasher dozens of times each,
and they've been re-shared on other pages, reaching thousands.
Blog surfing/commenting
e.g. CD Baby's "DIY" blog, where discussions of wages come up quite regularly, and provide ample (even important) opportunities for comments, and sharing of our web address. Blogs with huge readerships that disuss musicians' wages can be a goldmine for spreading the message.
Blogging
Writing articles related to our struggle, in line with the campaign's ideology: Here are a few that we've done so far.
Also, here are a few press pieces that have been written about us.
We're finding that although tons of people write about musicians and wages on the internet,
many (if not most) miss what we believe are the key points of the problem - - not to mention a solution.
We have tons of ideas to get you started; ask us, we'll share it with you if you like.
Writing campaign documentation.
For example, action guides, which are basically how-to documents for any kind of mission, including the ones on this page.
We currently have action guides for musician outreach, tabling, and a handful of others.
