Music Makes Politics. Live Aid and Live 8 as Tools of International Politics
Music Makes Politics. Live Aid and Live 8 as Tools of International Politics

Summary/Abstract: This article presents the Live 8 concerts as a particular case of media event (Dayan and Katz, 1994). In doing so, it will refer to the Live Aid concerts, in 1985, as a previous example of this kind of event. Live 8 is the name of a series of concerts that took place contemporaneously on the 2nd of July 2005 in different cities around the world, following the different time zones (London, Rome, Paris, Berlin, Barrie, Philadelphia, Tokyo, Moscow and Johannesburg). The concerts were organised by a group of celebrities, above all Bono and Bob Geldof, as the main “mediated peak” of the so called “Make Poverty History”. The campaign has been conceived to raise people’s attention on the problem of extreme poverty in Africa and in other countries in the world, and to put pressure on the Gleneagles G8 Summit, which took place in Scotland from the 6th to the 8th of July 2005. More than ten thousand artists performed during these concerts that have been broadcasted by 182 TV channels and two thousand radio stations all around the world. It has been estimated that the show reached a three billions people audience.

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