We were lucky to catch up with Corey Rosen recently and have shared our conversation below.

Corey, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. We’d love to hear about a project that you’ve worked on that’s meant a lot to you.

Mission Statement Public Broadcasting Music Television provides an ongoing and commercial free broadcast platform for artists from all cultures to virtually share their art to an international audience.

Vision Statement
PBMTV offers a Public Good by providing international community driven programming that includes visual art, music, education, comedy, drama, embodiment practices, healing workshops, experiential learning and more. Our content promotes co-creative and authentic expression, as well as respect for all differences. We offer an equitable and brave space for artists to connect with and inspire their audience. A space where they can thrive and transform communities all over the world.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I spent most of my life working towards or in the entertainment industry. After 15 years of working in live event production for events like the ESPN X-Games, HBO Comedy Fest, and the Primal Quest Adventure Race, and also in television and film production with companies like Universal, NBC, and HDNet, I was diagnosed with a permanent brain injury caused by a fall. With so much experience in my background, I decided to put myself to work for the Burning Man community and many of the associated events and festivals that have come out of that community, like StillDream, Shambhala, Envision, Lucidity Festival, Symbiosis, and so much more. For ten years, I developed a reputation where I could work just about any festival I wanted to attend.

Then in 2020, the pandemic happened. This ended my consistent ten year run of going where and working on what I wanted. To my suprise, I qualified for the pandemic unemployment. For the first time in ten years, I had a large amount of funds to do with what I wanted and needed. While most of my friends were trying their best to make the most out of the pandemic lockdown by buying toys or investing in crypto, I decided to put my funds into something more substantial. I came up with a project to keep myself busy during the lockdown and give my friends who were artists performing to 5-10 people a show, the opportunity to do something more and maybe even get more people to watch.

I came up with the Be Well Festival, an online streaming festival of artists from all over the world live streaming performances 12 hours a day on our channel. This was meant to be a fun project to keep us all busy during the lockdown, but it became something more. By the end of 2020, much longer than any of us had intended to be doing this, the Be Well Festival had a solid regular viewing audience of around 80-120 people per hour. It was decided that if we were going to keep the project going, we would need to establish it properly.

Public Broadcasting Music Television was born. A new website was built and PBMTV.org began broadcasting 24 hours a day on our own nonprofit network on August 1st, 2021. We established PBMTV as a Nonprofit entity and a PBS style membership network. Over the next two years, we had as many as 65 hours of live content scheduled a week, we have partnered with a number of festivals, artists collectives, venues, and production companies, and we have been creating a team to build a new, even more advanced website for artists.

This organization is built for independent artists by independent artists. Our goal is to become the nonprofit commercial-free HUB of independent music and art on the internet. To achieve this goal, we are designing a website that will combine the functionality of Twitch, YouTube, LinkTree, Shopify, Patreon, with the most in depth events calendar on one site, where artists can create their own profile page that they can then use as their own online EPK (Electronic Press Kit) to help market and promote themselves. When we launch this new site in early 2025, we hope all the things we have built into the site specifically for artists, will spread virally throughout local and international artist communities.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

After being diagnosed with a permanent brain injury, I found that I was unemployable. Insurance companies will not insure me for any company business plan, and my condition was not covered by HIPA. As a matter of fact, I was told by a few lawyers that if I didn’t disclose my brain injury during the interview process, I could be responsible for any damages caused because of my injury. So, I took my skills and went to Burning Man and other campout festivals. Between 2010 and 2020 when the pandemic began, I was pretty much homeless. At the beginning of 2020, I was homeless, except for my vehicle, which is a tiny house I built myself, and by the end of 2021, I had started a worldwide nonprofit network.

Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?

After four years, most of my financial and physical resources depleted, not a full day off since May 2020, still not completely where we want to be with this project, no idea when I might actually get a much needed break, and I still get asked that question all the time. My answer is simple, I have no idea. I have said that there must be some other driving force behind me that I can’t describe or quantify, because, from my background, I have never put this much time, energy, money, blood, sweat, and tears, into anything in my entire life, and I consider myself a pretty dedicated person. But I could have moved on many times over, recouped whatever expenses I could, and went back to working festivals and events again. For some reason, something very strong is preventing me from making any other decision than to see this through to its inevitable success or conclusion.

Many people who think they know me have mentioned that this project will be good for my legacy. I know many people are encouraged and incentivized by what they are doing is going to do for their name and their place in history. I look at PBMTV and think, “Who founded PBS?” No one knows that information off the top of their head. I hope it is the same for me and this network. As long as in 60 years, PBMTV is still operating as a nonprofit doing nothing more than helping artists and sharing those artists art with the art lovers of the world, then my name will not matter.

Contact Info:

• Website: pbmtv.org
• Instagram: https://instagram.com/pbmtvstationmanager
• Facebook: facebook.com/pbmtv
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/coreyrosen42/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/pbmtv2020

Image Credits
Photo by Ian Murphy