Men rule, and she’s fed up
Singer looks at inclusion riders to overcome lack of female performers, technicians
Nashville singer Margo Price is growing impatient with the music industry’s excuses over a lack of gender diversity. Each year, she can easily count the scant number of female musicians at summer music festivals and the few women who hold important technical jobs. From sound engineers to lighting techies, they’re almost always guys.
“I’m surrounded by men almost 100 per cent of the time,” Price says. “It’s a very uneven playing field.”
Price wants to see many facets of the music industry change, and she hopes encouraging conversation about “inclusion riders” will help make headway. The term was made famous by actor Frances McDormand when she dropped the phrase into her Oscar acceptance speech earlier this year.
Her comments, helped by the momentum of the #MeToo movement, sent ripples through Hollywood that are making their way into the music world. The topic of inclusion riders, and broader questions about diversity, were addressed as tastemakers gathered earlier this month at Canadian Music Week in Toronto.
Inclusion riders are a stipulation inserted into contracts which, generally speaking, give actors and actresses the ability to require at least 50 per cent of their production’s cast and crew to be women or people of colour. How the concept would be introduced into concert venues and recording studios is still a work in progress.
Tangible data on representation is difficult to come by, especially in Canada’s live music scene.
Very few studies have been conducted in recent years, though a 2015 survey of 455 women by the Nordicity consulting group found that female-identifying employees represented less than a quarter of overall staff in Ontario’s music industry.
Women were primarily working in promotional and marketing roles (20 per cent) while production staff represented a smaller amount (17 per cent). The study also found that only 10 per cent of stage performers were women.
Figures like these are what drove Price to slap an “inclusion rider” sticker on her guitar before performing on Conan O’Brien’s late-night show. She acknowledges it was mostly a symbolic gesture, but she’s already taking action that would require concert venues she plays to meet certain standards.
“I’m trying to get 30 per cent female staff,” she says. “I’d like it to be 50 per cent, but you’ve got to take small steps.”
Other artists are still reckoning with the possibilities of pushing for more equal representation.
Halifax indie rock band InFlight Safety pulled out of the nearby Rock the Hub festival last month saying the lineup consisted almost entirely of all-male and “nearly all-white” bands.
Meanwhile Leslie Feist, the singer-songwriter best known by her last name, says using her voice to encourage more diversity on music festival lineups is a relatively new idea for her.
“It’s actually the first time I’ve considered there is anything I could do about billings of a festival,” she said in a recent interview.
Feist described how grabbing a spot on a music festival often feels like winning the lottery, especially for artists just getting their start.
“There is the truth at a certain level a band is just lucky to get an opportunity to play at X-Y-Z festival,” she said.
“How to start to shift — that would be maybe in Beyoncé’s hands or something.”
Resting the responsibility on the shoulders of superstars such as Beyoncé — or widely known artists such as Feist — is the wrong approach, says University of Southern California professor Stacy Smith, co-creator of the inclusion rider concept, who spoke at a CMW forum about the stark disparity between gender representation in the music industry.
“Sure, their followings are larger, their megaphones are bigger, but we really need everyone focusing on issues of diversity and inclusion,” she says.
A study of 600 popular songs on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, between 2012 and 2017, found that when it comes to producers there’s 49 males for every female. Roughly 12 per cent of songwriters were female, according to data compiled by Smith’s Annenberg Inclusion Initiative.
The professor said she was surprised by how few women hold roles of prominence behind the scenes in the music industry, even compared with Hollywood’s underwhelming standards.