While we practise social distance in a physical sense, as sociable beings we naturally seek alternative ways in which we can connect with each other. The digital world had made connectivity possible in a way that would not have been imaginable even 10 years ago!
Social media has unsurprisingly seen a large surge in both users and use during lockdown. Sharing pictures, silly videos, quizzes and messages between family and friends helps us retain a sense of community, and supports us even if we are in isolation. Most importantly it helps us feel we are not alone in facing a situation for which there is no ‘normal’.
At Warwick Music Group we are driven by making the joy of music accessible and fun; that’s why we design our instruments in the way we do, why we create supporting free learning resources to accompany them and why we publish our music digitally. Everything we do we goes back to why – how will this new product/service/software help more people experience the joy of music?!
As a team of parents, teachers and musicians ourselves, we asked ourselves how we could apply this to our current situation – how could we help our musical community when people were having to stay physically apart?
We came up with lots of ideas (we’re good at that); free up resources, make popular music pieces free, provide free extra mouthpieces and even create an online music festival (you can see everything we pulled together here), and got them out to people as quickly as possible.
Our global musical community; musicians, parents, teachers and students have always been our biggest supporters. We’ve been fortunate in that we always have a very ‘engaged’ online audience, not only do our followers like us, they understand what drives us and join us in actively commenting and sharing our message.
What’s been so wonderful to see over the last couple of months for us is how much our activities have supported and been appreciated by our online community. Our audience increased to over one million people in the last month with engagement rates averaging 17% across our various platforms.
Finding little pockets of joy every day is so important, especially now. We’re delighted to be helping so many people access and experience music at home, and will continue to support our musical community in as many ways as we can – it’s what we do!
