Kevin Mazur/One Love Manchester/Getty Images for One Love ManchesterThe One Love Manchester concert held Sunday night to benefit the victims of last month’s attack at the Manchester Arena after an Ariana Grande concert is being hailed as a triumph — and now we know how much it raised.
Between text message and online donations, the show — featuring Ariana, Katy Perry, Justin Bieber, The Black Eyed Peas, Coldplay and more — raised $3.49 million. That brings the total raised by the British Red Cross’ “We Love Manchester Emergency Fund” to nearly $13 million.
Not only that, but the British paper The Telegraph says the British broadcast of the concert is the U.K.’s most-watched TV event of 2017 to date, drawing 22.6 million viewers. It also had close to a 50 share, which means that nearly 50% of everyone watching TV that night at the time of the broadcast tuned in to it.
That’s pretty great, considering Ariana’s manager revealed that at first, he doubted the show could even happen.
Scooter Braun tells Billboard, “From the moment the idea [of the benefit concert] came, I was very obsessed with it…[but[ I had to slow my mind down because Ariana…didn’t know if she could ever go on stage again. And then two days after, she called me and she goes, ‘Look, I need to do something….if I don’t do something, I feel like they might have died in vain.'”
Braun adds of Ariana, “Her courage and bravery is just amazing.”
Braun said for him, there were numerous highlights of the concert, but what sticks with him is that when all 55,000 people started to leave, they just started an impromptu singalong of “Manchester we’re strong,” the song that Robbie Williams had led them to sing early in the show.
Braun adds, “The city of Manchester was the hero of the show.”
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