Music

New study investigates gender gap in Australian music industry

On the eve of International Women’s Day, triple j released its now-annual Girls To The Front investigation.

Looking at the gender gap within the Australian music industry, the study looks at festival lineups, radio play and music grants, to how many women are on public boards, running record labels and the like.

Unsurprisingly, the findings show there’s still a long way to go to achieve gender equality in music but when compared to 2015’s results, it showed encouraging progress in some areas.

Most significantly, the gap has narrowed as a result of more women managing independent record labels and sitting on public boards of key music bodies.

Sadly, the gap still widened in other areas:

“Nominations of male artists for the APRA AMCOS awards increased from 54 per cent 63 per cent; feature albums by male acts on triple j increased from 67 per cent to 71 per cent; Groovin’ The Moo’s lineup increased its male acts from 63 per cent to 79 per cent.”

Adding:

“For the first time, Hack’s analysis also revealed the relatively even gender split across music students at Australian high schools and universities.”

The study included heaps of interesting data, including the drop in female artist managers (down to 40.5% from 45% in 2015), the slight rise in female managers at indie record labels (23% up from 20% in 2015) and the 41% female to 59% male split for those receiving music grants from the Australia Council for the Arts.

Discussing the issue of gender equality in the Australian music industry, Camp Cope’s Georgia, Kelly and Sarah contributed their experiences to the report.

“People told us, ‘You should book small venues because you don’t want to have a big venue that’s half-filled’,” Georgia says, “But we sold out every tour. It’s just patronising.”

Sarah says their challenges often aren’t taken seriously by men in the industry.

“If we listened to half of the people that told us not to do what we did, we still wouldn’t have recorded our album.

“We wouldn’t have done half of the things that we were told literally not to do.”

Read the full Hack report by triple j here.

Don’t forget, Girls To The Front now and always!

You can also read more about Ticketmaster’s WE Nation initiative here, designed to engage and inspired Live Nation women globally.