Is music becoming an increasingly male dominted industry?

Jake Marley w/ Ruby Munslow - February 2015

 

First of all this is a touchy subject and I'm expecting the odd person to disagree with a few things but here it goes.

 

The announcement of the 2015 R+L line-up brought up a important debate and issue.

No it's how bad the line-up is we'll leave that for another time. It's quite simply how male domintated the music industry is. I personally know of several female music journalists who I work with who are better than most men I know who do the job but they are in a increasing minority. A friend of mine recently mentioned on Twitter about not knowing of any female DJs and that she recently attended a lecture with 8 music journalism speakers of which 7 were male and the female hardly had the chance to speak, now I'm not a full blown feminist or anything but this seems crazy to me. In addition the ratio of male to female music writers is also crazy but the main issue is the small amount of female bands/artists being noticed or given a shot at the top besides in mainstream pop. Ie. Charts/

Someone took away all the bands/artists without female interaction from the R+L line-up and about 5/6 remained, there will be people who will come out and say - "but there isn't enough good female bands/musicians but I beg to differ, it will be interesting to see if this trend continues into other

festival announcements etc. but it's certainly an eye opener for me...

 

Gender equality has always been an issue in music and anyone who says it hasn't is quite simply in denial, the point about the R+L line-up above is interesting but to be honest I think it's the least of R+L's worries judging by the quality of their line-up. The funniest thing in all of this is that one of the best and most must-see bands on their line-up is one that would remain from this debate -

WOLF ALICE. Hmmmm.