The Truth About Women In Australia’s Music Industry

It’s a great day to celebrate being a woman or celebrate the women in your life. It’s also the perfect opportunity to look at how far we’ve really come in Australia.

Have you ever thought about how many women work in the Australian music industry? Or how many women get airplay? Triple J’s Hack crunched the numbers for International Women’s Day with their #GirlsToTheFront segment and found the answers.

A shocking statistic was found when the numbers for major licensing company APRA revealed that only 1 in 5 artists registered with their organisation were women. Good news is almost 50% of nominees for the APRA awards were female.

The director of APRA AMCOS’ Member Relations Milly Petriella told Hack, “I was really surprised and shocked at this, when I looked at this last year. I didn’t think it would be that bad, but I also didn’t think there would be a lack of information out there to find out why. I didn’t expect there to be a ‘this is why there isn’t women in the music industry’ written on a plaque somewhere, but I really did think there would be a lot more research done than I was able to find.”

In regards to airplay, Triple J found “out of 1680 songs playlisted over one week on Triple J in February 654 were by solo female artists, artists with at least one woman, or artists featuring a female vocalist.” The stats were worse when it came to Triple J feature albums in the last 12 months with only 33% of featured artists being a solo female artist or an artist with at least one woman.

Listen Out Music Festival delivered the most disagreeing statistic of the lot when it came to live music. The newer festival’s line up consisted of just 9% female artists – that equals out to two women on 2015’s bill.

It isn’t clear as to where the problem causing such a vast gap between men and women lies in the Australian music industry. Executive producer for the Electronic Music Conference Jane Slingo suspects it is partially in the hands of Artists & Repertoire departments of record labels and their scouting strategies. She emphasises her ability to “count on three fingers” the number of female A&Rs in Australia and suggests that if this were to change there would possibly be more female artists on festival line ups.

Triple J is being hosted by a complete female line up on air today, celebrating women in the industry.

Check out the full article to Triple J’s Hack #GirlsToTheFront  HERE