2021 Winner

2021 Winners

Over The Bridge
Lost Tapes of the 27 Club
The music industry has a mental health crisis. Over 70% of musicians have experienced anxiety and panic attacks, and suicide attempts among music industry workers are a straggering 2X higher than that of the general adult population. With the pandemic shutting down live venues around the world, the issue had only gotten worse. In Canada alone, a study conducted at the height of the pandemic showed that over three times as many individuals and organizations in the arts and culture industries reported high levels of stress and anxiety.

Over the Bridge, a non-profit focused on helping music industry workers with their mental health, wanted to make the public aware of this issue. By bringing awareness to an often stigmatized issue in an overlooked community, the hope was that conversation could result in prevention,and more musicians would begin reaching out for help.

To bring attention to the issue, the agency couldn’t just raise awareness within the industry, they had to reach fans. Because the industry’s meanth health problem isn’t just ignored, it’s been romanticized by our obsession with tortured artists. Artists like the 27 Club-group of legendary musicians were all lost to mental health struggles like anxiety, depression and addiction, at just 27 years old.To raise awareness of this crisis, they asked themselves one simple question: if these artists had gotten help, what could they have created?

To answer this question, they used artificial intelligence to create new songs by members of the 27 Club. The ‘Lost Tapes of the 27 Club’ is the first time that artificial intelligence has been used to create new music from late artists, and showcases the music that greats like Hendrix, Winehouse, Morrison, and Cobain could have created, had they gotten the mental health support they needed.

Using Magenta, an artificial intelligence platform developed by Google, they trained a computer to analyze the audio data from four members of the 27 Club, Hendrix, Winehouse, Morrison, and Cobain, to identify specific patterns in their riffs, rhythms, vocals, and melodies. From there, the artificial intelligence platform was able to generate all new riffs, rhythms, vocals, and melodies in these musician’s styles, which was used to produce entirely original music. Music the 27 Club could have created, had they gotten the mental health support they needed.

With these four original tracks, they launched the Lost Tapes of the 27 Club on March 25 across major music streaming platforms, including Spotify and Youtube Music. The track descriptions directed listeners to the micro-site, where they could find more information on mental health in the music industry, as well as contact information for Over the Bridge and other resources.

As with any album, it needed listeners. So, Rethink reached out to the top music publications across North America to tell them about the album and have them listen to it themselves. Rolling Stones picked up the story, releasing their article on the week of the anniversary of 27 club member Kurt Cobain’s death. The article soon became the second highest trending article on their website, and from there the Lost Tapes of the 27 Club album reached over 2 million streams in just one week, with listeners from over 160 countries worldwide. Suddenly, music’s mental health crisis was being discussed by the media across the world. Over 400 publications talked about the album and campaign across radio, TV and online articles in 54 countries, leading to over 1.7 billion impressions. Even the world’s most listened to podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience, discussed the album, after blind-reacting to the songs live, on-air.

Soon after the public began creating their own content around the campaign, uploading their covers on Youtube, Instagram and TikTok, producing their own music videos for the songs, and uploading their own tablature to guitar websites.

Having brought discussion around the music industry’s mental health problem to the world stage, the campaign saw over 127,000 unique visitors visit the microsite from over 164 countries, leading them to find out more about the resources available to those in the industry.

Beyond awareness, Over the Bridge saw a spike in musicians and their families reaching out to them for support, with an 830% increase in those contacting them for information.