Thank you so much for hunting this, Emily! 🙏 Coronavirus has caused thousands of events to be cancelled or postponed around the UK, meaning musicians all over the UK are now stuck at home unable to earn money from performing. In March alone the Encore team had to process almost 500 gig cancellations, so we began brainstorming ways to help our musicians make money during lockdown when they had no gigs on the horizon. The most obvious route to income for a musician right now is asking for donations on livestreams, but we heard from our musicians that they’ve seen mixed results from this approach. The internet is now awash with live streams, so we wanted to go beyond this and develop a compelling product that didn’t rely on asking for donations. We also wanted to find a way to spread messages of love and hope throughout one of the darkest periods any of us have lived through, which led us to the idea of Personalised Music Messages to solve a problem we were facing ourselves. We’re a team of musicians, so whenever it’s someone's birthday in the office, we gather round the piano and sing Happy Birthday for them. We’ve had two birthdays in the last two weeks during lockdown, so we thought we could ask some of our musicians to perform our team members’ favourite songs for them as birthday presents. The reactions were amazing and musicians had a lot of fun making the videos, so we decided to turn this into a product for our customers. We've had people sending songs to their parents, sending birthday messages to family abroad, songs for relatives in hospital, songs for grandparents in care homes, songs for NHS workers, etc. It's honestly been amazing and the most heartwarming thing we've ever done at Encore. 😌 Huge kudos to the entire Encore team for researching, prototyping, developing, iterating and launching this within a chaotic 2-week period. 💪 Happy to answer any questions!

Love this initiative. Professional musicians are struggling to make a living right now with live events cancelled and postponed due to social distancing. This is a lovely way to let a friend or loved one know you are thinking of them whilst also supporting a musician and the NHS at the same time.

Lovely initiative that will help you to bring joy into your friends and family life and much needed income to independent musicians. Go forth!!!

this is an siiick idea!! well done @jamsusmaximus !

Really nice idea man. Based on my (very biased) groups I'm a part of, I'd recommend getting some examples of funny ones about a particular friend. They then tend to be shared amongst their friends more, spreading your site further. I once genuinely paid for a person on Fiverr to dress up like jesus and insult my friend - it honestly went down so well (amongst the big group we were part of) and was worth every penny!