Female mis representation in the festival industry - Noisy Vice

http://noisey.vice.com/en_uk/blog/its-not-just-reading-and-leeds-females-are-under-represented-in-every-festival-line-up-2015

IT’S NOT JUST READING AND LEEDS, WOMEN ARE UNDER-REPRESENTED IN EVERY FESTIVAL LINE-UP

"That’s a shocking amount. That’s less than ten percent. And, unfortunately, the problem goes way deeper than just Reading and Leeds."

Just take a look at the line-up for this year’s Slam Dunk festival, announced this morning.

Leaving the female acts on the bill, there’s just one name: PVRIS.

Looking back at other line-ups, it’s clear there’s a wide spread lack of female artists on loads of festival bills. Download features only nine bands with non-male members and both T in the Park and Coachella’s rosters look bare when the male-fronted artists have been removed.

Startlingly the empty festival poster campaigns impacted me massively, visually showing this massive decline in female acts at festival articulated the enormity of this problem conveying this in a visual way.

In her book Clothes Clothes Clothes, Music Music Music, Boys Boys Boys Viv Albertine stated that “women were sneered at whatever they did, so to rise above that you had to be doubly scary." But as 2014 proved – a year where females dominated the pop charts and news cycles – things have progressed since then.

Do festival bills clearly seem to prioritise male acts?

The unintelligent and stunted humans of the world believe it’s because “80% of bands with girls in suck” – but that’s just not true. You only need to spend five-minutes working at a music publication or sifting through Soundcloud to find that actually 80% of all music sucks, regardless of gender.

Reasons behind less women on line ups:

• One reason there may be less women on the line-up, with specific focus on the rock festivals, comes down to Britain’s alt-rock scene. As Noisey writer Hannah Ewens found when writing about the UK alt-rock scene, it’s too often a place where  “girls are a) side-lined, b) fetishised and/or tokenized for having great music taste or c) dismissed as the girlfriend that doesn’t like music at all.” And rock festival line-ups seem to be pretty reflective of this, cementing the image of a male-engineered environment where it’s far too hard for female artists to gain some proper recognition.
• Melvin Benn, the managing director of Festival Republic who booked Reading and Leeds - claims women aren’t side-lined, and insisted in an interview with Gigwise that there’s “an abundance of opportunity” for female artists to get on festival bills. It’s an insistence that tries to shift the blame, suggesting that the opportunities are equal, but the availability of quality artists isn’t, so it’s supposedly impossible to have balanced line ups. This was ‘explained’ in the most hamfisted manner possible by Warped Tour founder Kevin Lyman when he was quizzed by Wondering Sound’s Megan Seling last summer as she investigated his festival’s dodgy oversights. “If you Google-search bands in the world, the vast majority of them are male. That’s a correct assumption, right?” said Kevin.
• This bullshit 'assumption' is the main problem causing the cyclical pattern in which less and less female artists are getting booked, when, in reality there are plenty who are absolutely killing it right now. Where’s Perfect Pussy – not only the best named band in the world but also, in front-woman Meredith Graves, perhaps the most important female figures in punk since Kathleen Hanna? What about Against Me! who put out one of the best albums of last year or Sleater-Kinney, who reformed this year? Then you’ve got White Lung, Joanna Gruesome, Savages, and Warpaint – all examples of bands that could feasibly be placed on any rock-heavy line-up, anywhere in the country.
• If, as many bookers would have you believe, the Reading and Leeds line-up is reflective of the average music attendee’s iPod, then it’s because female artists are still being neglected, not because they don’t exist. The blame doesn’t just lie with the festivals – the country's leading music magazine, NME, have put just eight women on their cover in the last three years, and scanning over Kerrang's past issues page shows although they're doing their part, the cover is rarely given solely to a woman, suggesting the media also carry some culpability.
• But increasingly, as all of the above female artists have proved, they’re gaining recognition from releasing music that rips, regardless of whether they’re given a main stage or a cover. And power to them. But it’s up to the music festivals – who don’t have ABC’s to retain – to showcase the talents of female artists with the same spread as their male counterparts. Maybe they need better bookers, maybe the bands mentioned above weren’t available, but neither of those reasons are good enough to result in a 90/10 gender split.

HANNA WANTS... TO HEADLINE LEEDS FEST, LET HANNA DO WHAT SHE WANTS

NME PLEASE PICK ME

NME, YOUR COVERS NEED ME

Que giant list of female acts who should be playing at festivals:

noisey.vice.com/en_uk/blog/its-not-just-reading-and-leeds-females-are-under-represented-in-every-festival-line-up-2015


From evaluating this website and selecting the key information, I can take my findings to the crit, along with other research from other sources and form a strong sided debate into which I can create promotional material promoting this cause.

Leading me onto to more thorough research about the underlying problems such as reasoning as to why women may be being under represented, opinions, quotes, figures and statistics.

Using sources focussing with strong music roots such as Noisey vice, to more mainstream news outlets The Telegraph, this broader form of secondary research gave me a wider result to conclude what the problems were researching quotes and articles from men and women of different professions and different social classes.