Yoke Lore
Emotionally and often physically, music moves people.
It’s the core concept of WithOthers, an events platform for artists and fans looking to change the world.
With a mission to make social impact events more accessible and relevant for everyone, WithOthers is led by previous founders from Sofar Sounds and executives from Billboard.
“We think a lot here about effective impact— what actually drives changes in hearts and minds and it’s historically been culture,” WithOthers founder and CEO Tom Lovett says over a recent Zoom call. “Culture has always been at the center of movement building for decades. But I think that there's a trick to that, which is sustained participation.”
As Lovett explains, instead of seeing a big show once a year like Ed Sheeran that supports climate change reform, WithOthers aims to do “real movement building” by taking the big stadium model and spreading it out to multiple nights of the week and featuring a mix of organizations and artists.
“Artists have this unique capacity for influence and this unique capacity to gather people,” he says. “It's not only about artists you love wanting you to act, but it's them doing so in that live event space, which has this unique, magical quality— I've seen this all through my career— to affect you and to make it more likely that you will act versus if you were seeing that in a social media post.”
See also: How The Sun Rose Elevates Los Angeles' Live Music Scene
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In particular, WithOthers is teaming up with Yoke Lore and Cape Francis on July 16 for a special, intimate evening to benefit March For Our Lives and support the end of gun violence in the U.S.
“I'm just a huge fan of Yoke Lore (Adrian Galvin),” Joe Kelley, WithOthers’ head of artist partnerships, says of the upcoming show. “He's extremely vocal about issues that he cares about, which I've always respected greatly and I knew he'd be right for a WithOthers event, so when I came on board, he was definitely one of the first people that I had reached out to.”
The July 16 show continues WithOthers’ spring-summer series that launched in March. After closing out that run, the platform will launch a fall-winter run in September and has plans to expand into other cities.
“I think that artists are activists,” Lovett says. They always have been, but sometimes they need a better toolkit to realize that and that's what we're doing here. We're not just putting on some shows. We're really trying to build a platform for artists and other creators to realize the influence they have over their fans to support causes that they themselves care most about.”
Artist: Julia Wolf
Organization: Daughters for Earth
Date: July 30th
Location: L.A.
Artist: Emmy Meli
Organization: TBA
Date: August 27th
Location: L.A.
Photography by: Courtesy WithOthers
