The Crew books a 17th CMA Awards viewing party for Musicians On Call

The Crew will hold its 17th annual CMA Awards viewing party on 18 November at Tin Roof Nashville Downtown, starting at 6pm CT, with the 60th Annual CMA Awards playing live on screens throughout the venue and the takings going to Musicians On Call.

Seventeen years makes this one of the more durable fixtures on the Nashville industry calendar, and the group behind it is not an artist or a label but a collection of working executives. The organisers named in the announcement come from Red Light Management, Sony Music Publishing, One Riot Music, MCA, The MLC, Edgehill Music Publishing, SMACKSongs, the law firm Keller Turner Andrews & Ghanem and the Smoking Section Podcast, which is a reasonable cross-section of the people who actually run the business.

Last year's party raised more than $24,000. That is a modest figure next to a gala, and it is the point: this is a room of colleagues watching an awards show together and paying for the privilege, rather than a black-tie fundraiser with a table price. Sponsorship packages are still available through two of the organisers.

The beneficiary has been doing the same work for 25 years. Musicians On Call brings live music directly to patients, families and caregivers in healthcare settings, through bedside performances, virtual sessions and streaming programmes, and says it has connected more than one million people across all 50 states with music this way.

That model relies on volunteer musicians being routed into hospitals rather than on the charity staging events of its own, which makes an annual industry party an efficient way to fund it: the people in the room are the ones who can also supply the artists.

The date puts the benefit in the middle of the busiest week of the Nashville year. The 60th Annual CMA Awards follows a nominations announcement made on 10 September, and the country calendar around it has already carried other benefit shows, among them Drake White returning his Benefit For The Brain to the Ryman. The longest-running example of the form remains Dolly Parton's book programme, built to outlast its founder.