NEW YORK — K’naan kicked off a free concert in Central Park on Saturday evening that also promised performances by the Black Keys and Neil Young to call attention to poverty worldwide.
Dubbed the Global Citizen Festival, the concert lineup featured Band of Horses and Foo Fighters as well. Video of the event was streamed worldwide as about 60,000 music fans poured into the park.
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The concert was scheduled around the meeting of the United Nations General Assembly in New York last week, and organizers used an innovative approach to ticket distribution so that many concert-goers were forced to learn about an array of global problems, such as polio, malaria, child mortality and polluted drinking water.
Anyone wanting free tickets had to register at globalcitizen.org, which then required users to watch videos or read information about poverty-related issues. Each time material was consumed, users could earn points toward a drawing for tickets. Points were also accumulated by sharing information via Twitter or Facebook.
Organizers said more than 71,000 people had signed up online, resulting in more than 3.5 million page views. On average, they spent just over six minutes consuming content or sharing information.
Nearly 200,000 pieces of information were shared on Facebook, and just a bit more than that on Twitter.
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