Founded 1999 Registration no. 1125646 Area served South East England | Type Youth music Location South East England, UK | |
 | ||
Focus Challenging circumstances | ||
Rhythmix is one of the United Kingdom's leading music charities, delivering a large range of music making opportunities for young people across the South East region. Since 1999, Rhythmix has worked with more than 40,000 young people, enabling their creative activity through music and developing their personal and social skills.
Contents
Activities
Rhythmix works with its partners in Youth Support Services, such as Youth Workers, Arts Officers, Crime Reduction and Youth Offending Teams, to identify young people in challenging circumstances, and enables those young people to shape and develop projects that respond to their needs.
Working with a team of over 50 professional community musicians, Rhythmix is continually developing innovative and exciting new programmes that challenge young people to express their creativity.
Rhythmix manages and delivers Musical Inclusion (Lottery funded by Youth Music) for Brighton & Hove, East Sussex, West Sussex, Kent and Surrey. This programme is the direct engagement with young people delivering programmes that address Exclusion, Challenging Circumstances and Young People at Risk and encourage the talent and potential of these young people.
2011 The X Factor dispute
In 2011, Rhythmix came to widespread media attention when the television presenter and music promoter Simon Cowell attempted to trademark the name Rhythmix in relation to the girl group which featured on, and eventually won, the eighth series of The X Factor. After a legal challenge, Cowell's company, Syco, dropped the trademarking application and the group agreed to change their name to Little Mix. Following the dispute, Cowell donated an undisclosed sum to the charity.
In response to the X Factor naming controversy, an online protest was launched to promote the Nirvana single "Smells Like Teen Spirit" to 2011 Christmas number one in the UK Singles Chart, in an attempt to emulate a successful 2009 Facebook campaign to promote Rage Against the Machine's song "Killing in the Name", and hence prevent the X Factor winners from taking the spot.