A few weeks ago I sat on a panel at The Cellar in Oxford to share my wide-ranging, extensive, and not-at-all-made-up-on-the-spot wisdom about promoting and marketing independent music events to a room full of budding promoters and musicians. On a panel of six that day, two were women. And here’s the thing anyone that goes to music industry conferences regularly will already know; 33% female representation is actually a pretty good diversity split compared to what you normally see.
It must be pointed out – and, indeed, it has, in this Huffington Post article by the Association of Independent Music’s Lara Baker titled ‘The Challenge of Organising a Gender-Balanced Conference in the Music Industry’ – that putting together gender-balanced events is not an easy task. Thankfully, this is where our friends at Let’s Be The Change step in.
Describing themselves as “an initiative to promote, inspire and support women in music”, the organisation is run by the amazing Sammy Andrews (whose presentation at the AIF Congress last year was inspirational – see here). Let’s Be The Change’s goal “is to collate a master list of women in our industry who are happy to speak at events, or have never spoken at events and want to start…. We also plan to offer some coaching and mentorship as part of this initiative as well as promoting the amazing work, initiatives and events of existing women in music organisations. We’ll use the information you provide to allow conferences internationally to find female speakers for their events.”
This being an undeniably excellent initiative we’re very happy to help spread the word. Not only will this blog post be read by many people working in the music industry, but we’ll be informing all the event organisers selling tickets on our site about Let’s Be The Change, and hopefully making the male dominated panels we’ve witnessed over the years a thing of the past.
If you’d like to find out more or sign-up visit the Let’s Be The Change website and Twitter pages.
Ladies of the music industry head over to https://t.co/jyGtEOshBC and sign up if you want to be part of the database – we can change this 🙌
— Let's Be The Change (@UKWomenInMusic) January 22, 2017
We've placed 15 female speakers since we launched two weeks ago 🙂 it's working!!! ☺️☺️☺️☺️
— Let's Be The Change (@UKWomenInMusic) February 3, 2017
For more like this follow @WGT_Steven on Twitter.
Leave a Reply