The New York City premiere of Money for Nothing: Behind the Business of Pop Music was held on February 23, 2002. The screening was hosted by New York City Independent Media Center (IMC), in Brooklyn. The proceeds from the screening benefitted the IMC’s newspaper.

 

Money for Nothing producers Kembrew McLeod and Jeremy Smith were on-hand to introduce the video. They were joined by Claudia Gonson (musician, Magnetic Fields) and Shirley Halperin (music journalist, HITs and Bop magazines) for a panel discussion following the screening. With its focus on issues of corporate control and conglomeratization of the pop music industry, Money for Nothing sparked discussion about the current work Congressmen John Conyers and Howard Berman are doing to bring these issues before the House Judiciary Committee, the Federal Communication Commission and the U.S. Attorney General’s Office.

 

New York IMC is affiliated with Indymedia, a collective of independent media organizations and hundreds of journalists offering grassroots, non-corporate coverage, which was established by various independent and alternative media organizations and activists in 1999 for the purpose of providing grassroots coverage of the World Trade Organization (WTO) protests in Seattle. Since then, hundreds of media activists have established independent media centers on every continent, with more to come.