Ryan Tedder doesn’t quite understand the musicians releasing new music amid the coronavirus pandemic. The OneRepublic singer called out his peers in the music industry who are putting out new singles and albums without donating the proceeds to charity in this difficult time worldwide in a conversation with USA Today Monday.
Explaining that his band had planned on releasing a new song before summer, Tedder explained “it’s really hard to get anyone to pay attention” to new music during something like this. “Nobody can compete with the news cycle right now,” he continued. “We have this huge record that we wanted to drop in mid-May that we now won’t. It’s a summer song, it’s like the Beach Boys, it feels like such a hit, but I’m not going to do it in the middle of a pandemic.”
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The musician added he was only comfortable releasing music with a charitable goal in mind, with OneRepublic revealing two weeks ago that their profits from the song “Better Days” would be donated to the Red Cross. “I felt weird saying, ‘Come buy my stuff, check me out.’ Meanwhile, people are sick and dying,” Tedder explained. “It’s very tone-deaf. And unless you’re an artist who had a lot of momentum going into this pandemic, like The Weeknd or Dua Lipa, it’s really hard to get anyone to pay attention … I have a lot of songs with artists — Miley Cyrus, Diplo, Katy Perry — that were all supposed to be coming out in the next couple of months. Some of them might, but I can tell you that every single artist I’ve talked with is sitting there going, ‘Well, what do I do? Is it going to be a tree falling in a forest?’”
Despite the thousands of concerts and events that were canceled due to the coronavirus, the Songland star has full faith the music industry will make a grand return. “Do I think 2021 might break every concert attendance record of any previous year in history? Absolutely,” he said. “The only thing we can do is put measures in place of preparedness, and we will be so freakin’ prepared for the next pandemic that we’ll be able to meet it head-on.”
