Keep Music Alive: Spotlight on Teach Music Week

In March of 2015, Keep Music Alive founded Teach Music Week, which encourages musicians, music teachers, and music schools everywhere to offer a free 30 minute lesson or class to new students. Held each year on the third week of March—coinciding with NAfME’s Music In Our Schools Month—Keep Music Alive recently celebrated their 5th year of Teach Music Week.

This year’s program drew participation from over 750 locations in 15 countries. We recently spoke with Keep Music Alive’s co-founder, Vincent James, to gain insight into how the program has grown over the last five years, what the feedback from participants has been like, and where he sees the program going in the future.

How much has Teach Music Week grown in the last 5 years?

It’s funny actually—for the first year, the planning and marketing for Teach Music Week consisted of no more than a few posts on our Keep Music Alive Facebook page to encourage musicians to offer a free lesson to someone they knew.

In 2016, the second year, we started connecting with music schools encouraging them to participate and to let their community know. That year there were 23 music schools in 8 U.S. states that signed up to participate. Fast forward three more years to 2019, and over 750 music schools, music stores, and other music organizations across 15 countries participated by offering a free lesson or class. It seems amazing to us that it’s grown so much in such a short time. In reality, its a credit to my wife and co-founder Joann, who almost single-handedly built our in-house music school database, and reaches out to thousands of music schools each year.

How can musicians and teachers find new students to teach throughout the year, beyond during Teach Music Week?

That’s a really great question. We’ve discovered that some music schools offer a free trial lesson year round to encourage new students to try out an instrument, and we’re huge fans of that. If a prospective student is willing to come in and spend time at your location, this is a great opportunity for teachers and staff to connect with that student and begin to build a relationship. Even if it doesn’t result in an immediate lesson program sign up, a positive trial lesson experience absolutely serves to plant seeds that will lead to benefits down the line.

In addition to consider offering a free trial year round, we also encourage music teachers and music schools to hold community events throughout the year that will draw attention to their services. Examples include instrument petting zoos, student performances in the community and community jams.

What has the feedback been from teachers, new students, and retailers who have participated?

Music teachers love the concept of Keep Music Alive—promoting the many benefits of playing music and encouraging more kids (and adults) to begin their own musical journeys. Music schools and music retail locations appreciate the fact that there is no external cost to them to participate in Teach Music Week. In addition to listing their location, logo, link and contact information on the Teach Music Week website for a full year, we also connect with print, radio and TV media in all major markets to encourage them to write and talk about Teach Music Week. By helping to drive prospective music students to participating locations, we’ll serve our ultimate Keep Music Alive mission of having more kids and adults reaping the many benefits of playing a musical instrument. New students taking their very first lesson for free have commented that they love the opportunity to try out an instrument for the first time. What’s interesting is that in some cases, existing musicians are trying out a different instrument for the first time.

What is your vision for Teach Music Week in the years to come?

Each year, we get closer and closer to a tipping point where Teach Music Week will start to spread on its own—not that Keep Music Alive is going to stop promoting it when that happens! Eventually, we’d love to see over 5,000 music schools and music stores participating worldwide each year by offering a free trial lesson to an average of 10 new students. If you add in potentially thousands of individual music teachers offering a free lesson to at least one student, the collective impact would be close to 100,000 new students getting their first music lesson during Teach Music Week.

To learn more about Keep Music Alive and Teach Music Week, visit KeepMusicAlive.org .