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Leading music website Garageband.com has got behind Independent Artist Aid with a portal-to-portal link from its front page.

Although Independent Artist Aid is in no way an official Garageband.com venture, it is nevertheless something that came about because all of the participants in Hope Never Dies first "met" at Garageband - either through the messageboards there or via the site's blind review process. Some are still active in the GB community while others have moved on, but the opportunity for all of us to find each other was provided in the first instance by Garageband. Which in my opinion is the kind of thing that online music communities should be doing.

Thanks to everyone who posted at the Garageband BBS in favour of an official acknowledgement of our project, and also to the many who contacted me privately about it. And big thanks to Ali Partovi, Garageband's CEO, for listening and making it happen.

Everything helps here. And whatever you read in the papers or see on TV about the Tsunami survivors having enough aid money now, please don't believe a word of it. There's SO much still to do over there and if we can put a tiny drop of cash towards helping some traumatised fellow-humans to get their lives back on track, let's do it. And what better way to benefit everyone than by supporting independent music at the same time??