In this special episode, we share the WebCall last week to hear what was happening on the ground in Seattle, WA and King County, WA, in the face of COVID-19's closure of music venues and live experiences.  Kate Becker talks about how King County is responding to the virus, what they are telling their music venues, businesses, artists and community, and generally shared her moving perspective on lessons learned throughout this process of pandemic and public health.

An innovative program, called the Bruin Tech Award, launched this week, offers an emergency award of up to $1,000 to support students who may not have the technology at home needed to access online classes, such as up-to-date computers or wi-fi.

In this week's Innovating Music podcast, Karen Allen helps decode and make simpler streaming music for artists on Twitch.  Twitch is a live streaming service, bought by Amazon in 2014, and has 2.2 million daily broadcasters and 15 million daily average viewers.  It is mostly gamers, but also has creative and music channels for its highly creative audience.  Karen shares her own explorations in learning to use YouNow and now Twitch.  She shares what fan bases are there and how this type of engagement is different than what artists might have from other platforms.  She shares how you can learn further with her book and online class, Twitch for Musicians. 

In collaboration with the American University of Armenia, the UCLA Armenian Music Program will perform in a concert tour around the Republic of Armenia, from March 19 to 21.

The UCLA campus is closely monitoring COVID-19 and its potential impacts on students, faculty and staff.

In this week's Innovating Music podcast, Matt Black has been intrigued by computers since reading "The Shockwave Rider" from a bookmobile in his small English village of his youth. Since then, he has created scratch mixes from a set of decks across London warehouse parties in the late 1980s, pirate radio, become the band Coldcut, created major hits, launched the label Ninja Tune, and developed mad programming skills. He builds what he calls "software instruments" for the iPad and (when he can) Android, expanding this year from Ninja Jam to JammPro, letting artists make their own tracks.