The Ontario Government’s music program funding was cut with little warning. Regent Park School of Music was in immediate need of a reliable funding stream to ensure its students, most from high-risk neighbourhoods, continued to have a safe place to create music. Instead of a traditional fundraising campaign, we developed a new, disruptive fundraising model. By making an album of original ‘samples’ featuring its students, Parkscapes has created a revenue stream which generates ongoing royalty payments and opportunity for its students. This new model can be used by any non-profit music school to build both morale and generate funds indefinitely.

RPSM is a non-profit, after school community music program that gives over 1,000 youths aged 3-18 quality music education in high-risk neighborhoods in Toronto through subsidized classes, while also providing them with positive mentorship to help build their confidence and keep them out of trouble.

RPSM relies on private donations and government funding to keep running, including the Ontario Music Fund (OMF). With the OMF being slashed by 50%, RPSM needed a new way to acquire money in order to keep inspiring kids through music.

In the absence of an annual media budget, the brief and primary objective was to develop an original idea that reached beyond traditional fundraising methods to create a new revenue stream. With RPSM’s public profile being low, our second objective was to create a talk-worthy idea using earned media to help raise awareness of the school and its purpose, while prompting others to give.

Our idea was to create an album of original music samples performed by the students from RPSM, and have a portion of the dividends from sales, licensing and royalties get paid back to the school. As royalties are paid out regularly for the life of the song, we were creating an entirely new, reliable revenue stream for RPSM.

Our strategy was to leverage the one thing the school churned out in spades - music. By partnering with audio aficionados, our hope was they would be moved to donate or share our initiative. We hoped these music mavens would become advocates for RPSM, amplifying our message within the music community. The nature of our eventual idea prompted us to broaden our target to musicians themselves; musicians with an equal amount of passion for music culture who could not only become advocates, but donors.

In the absence of a paid media budget, we would partner with an influencer in the music industry and leverage their following on social media to help spread the message about our album.

We approached Toronto-born, Grammy winning producer Frank Dukes to compose the 11-track album called “Parkscapes”. He loved the idea of turning a music library into a sustainable fundraising model. Dukes was a logical choice; not only had he produced for big artists like Drake and The Weeknd, his Kingsway Music Library website was already a popular hub for musicians looking for original samples to use in their music. By making Parkscapes available where musicians were already shopping for samples, the hope was that we would get used by a legitimate artist.

Dukes spent three days in a Toronto music studio working alongside 14 students to create the album. A combination of steel pan, harp, organ, voices, strings and horns were used to create the compositions.

Given Dukes’ reach and reputation within the music industry, we launched the album from his Instagram account in June 2019 which had over 77k followers

Dukes is followed by many influential artists who shared their love for our idea and amplified our posts organically to over 62 million followers.

When we heard that we’d been sampled, we never predicted that it would be by the biggest pop star. Taylor Swift used our composition “Summer in the South” as the basis of her song “It’s Nice to Have a Friend” on her album, Lover.

Countless news outlets, national and international, picked up the story resulting with over 130 pieces of earned media garnering over 3.49 billion impressions. DreamWorks even licensed the song for the movie “Abominable”.

RPSM now has a model providing a one-of-a-kind mentorship program, giving students the opportunity to create future libraries. But there’s no metric for giving a kid from a high-risk neighbourhood with limited resources the feeling of being on the #1 selling album in the world. That feeling is immeasurable.