After putting in a colossal effort to contact you all and ask you to Like Kimwei’s Eco song video “The Wild Things Are Coming To Town” so that we could win the £10k we needed to be able to make more climate protest music… we won!
… But we didn’t win.
How could this be?
Well, on May 6th 2024 the song with the most YouTube Likes was supposed to win £10k from the eco-concious competition group HomeStage… and on May 6th our song was indeed the song with the most YouTube Likes… but Home Stage changed the rules at that point saying that actually the song with the most YouTube Likes on June 30th would win. They then censored our video, taking out any references to an upcoming protest march that our song had been written to mobilise people to attend. Finally they hid the Like count on all YouTube Videos in the competition and in the end another artist (Ollie Frost – who we like actually) won but the numbers were never revealed publicly. Shortly after that, our video was taken down from YouTube.
The whole experience left me and the band feeling demoralised – the actions of HomeStage had been extractive of our time and energy and still left us without the funds that we needed to move forward with protest music.
The only comfort that came forward was one friend who said “Oh you’ve been censored! Congratulations! That means you’re making an impact!”
Thank you to all of you who voted and put us in the winning position on the original and rightful competition end-date of May 6th 2024. It still means a great deal to us that we had your support.
Love and Rage
-Kimwei (they/them)