KPBS created the Summer Music Series to highlight San Diego’s diverse music scene and provide a platform for engaging storytelling and conversations about our community. It began in 2019 with in-studio performances and interviews, but with the pandemic, we had to re-calibrate and find creative solutions to keep the series going and relevant. We’ve increased the focus on diversity, using music as a thread to discuss Black Lives Matter, cultural appropriation, hardships wrought by the pandemic and music as therapy. In order to create the multimedia experience beyond just radio, we collaborated with our TV and web departments to create specialized content for each platform, artist videos with demonstrations and commentary, long-form interviews for web and a Spotify playlist to increase our presence in the music social media space.
Our community needs respite from the news cycle and the harsh reality we all face. Music not only brings positivity and hope, but it allows us to have hard conversations in a creative way, bringing our community together.