On Tuesday, Sept. 5, at 8 p.m. Eastern time, Drum Corps International will be repeating its hugely successful "DCI on ESPN2" broadcast of the Division I World Championship Finals, which debuted last September. NAMM, the International Music Products Association, is again the presenting sponsor of the program. The move of the broadcast in 2005 to ESPN2 was designed to raise general public awareness of the drum corps activity, which fits perfectly with NAMM's intent to reinforce the value of quality music education. "Our mission is to support music and create more music," said Joe Lamond, President and CEO of NAMM. "We're always trying to find more ways to support music education and music-making."
The partnership between DCI and NAMM came about almost accidentally. "I met [DCI Executive Director] Dan Acheson at the Midwest Band and Orchestra Clinic a couple of years ago. We started talking about projects we could do together, and Dan suggested this to me as something that would really help DCI out that NAMM could do," said Lamond. "It was just a case of two organizations getting together and pulling the trigger. It was great for us too – visits to our Web site, SupportMusic.com, spiked after the broadcast. It really helped us get the message out for music-making." NAMM represents a broad constituency of manufacturers and retailers of instruments in 104 countries and uses proceeds from its trade shows to promote music education by sponsoring research studies, grants and projects like the DCI World Championship broadcast. "We lobby both state and federal government to support music education in the schools," said Lamond. "We act as a real funnel for the industry to promote music-making. Our members tell us what they want us to do to promote music-making, and we do it." Lamond said that in the music industry, the use of business to support philanthropy is a natural fit. "The industry is made up of a lot of people who were musicians first, who were deeply passionate about music first, then made a career choice toward music later. So they are really promoting what they love," he explained. "On the business side, they sincerely think that the more the general public gets involved with music, the society is improved. People involved in music are deeply socially conscious," he says. "We are musicians first and business people second."