Gilles Peterson’s Worldwide FM launches creative platform Make Art Work

Worldwide FM, the online radio station started by Gilles Peterson, has launched a new platform called Make Art Work, which hopes to help musicians and creatives affected by Covid-19 to have their work financed and developed. The initiative aims to offer a different route for brands and agencies to find fresh, innovative ideas and collaborators, by showcasing projects on the site by a range of creatives, which members will be able to peruse and then potentially connect with their creator to develop the idea.

Members will have to pay for access to the site, with all profits split between the artists being showcased. The curated platform will be regularly updated with new projects for those members to explore. Artists can present their ideas, research and initial creations as they stand for brands and organisations to pick up. Then, the brand and creator can work together to evolve the project. Each idea will be protected and safeguarded to prevent any conceptual misrepresentations.

The platform has been launched in response to the current emergency across the creative and music sectors, aiming to encourage recovery with an emphasis on promoting ideas, offering commercial guidance and making collaboration more streamlined. Its hope is to reframe the way brands and traditional talent agencies work, and how they engage with their audiences; a factor which the team behind Make Art Work says will be “paramount to delivering successful briefs now”.

“Worldwide FM and platforms like ours can only exist because of the brilliant individuals who make up the creative sector,” says Worldwide FM managing director Dan Moss in a statement. “Our network of artists, creatives and collectives have experienced a historically torrid time over the past 12 months, but their wonderful ideas and projects that we hear about every day feel more relevant and vital than ever. Make Art Work is our commitment to the people pushing culture forward – we believe we must come out of this pandemic with better ways of reflecting art’s immense value to society.”

Make Art Work’s first wave of curated projects will include an environmentally friendly vinyl packaging system, Wax For Life, and a docuseries bringing together creatives from across the global Black diaspora to share experiences and practices around the world.