Live Aid was a multi-venue rock music concert held on July 13, 1985. The event was organized by musicians Bob Geldof and Midge Ure to raise funds for famine relief in Ethiopia. Billed as the “global jukebox,” the main sites for the event were Wembley Stadium, London (attended by 82,000 people) and JFK Stadium, Philadelphia (attended by about 99,000 people). It was one of the largest-scale satellite link-ups and television broadcasts of all time: an estimated 1.5 billion viewers, across 100 countries, watched the live broadcast.
The concert was conceived as a follow-up to another Geldof/Ure project, the successful charity single, “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” performed by a collection of British and Irish music acts billed as “Band Aid.” The concert grew in scope as more acts were added on both sides of the Atlantic. As a charity fundraiser, the concert far exceeded its goals: they hoped to raise one million pounds and the final figure was 150 million pounds. No previous concert had ever brought together so many famous performers from the past and present. In 2005, a follow-up concert called Live 8 was held simultaneously in several countries.
