Women In Pop, no. 14, June 2023
by Emma Driver •
Music festivals are big business, but how much of that business benefits female artists? And how much do organisers care for and respect the women who buy their tickets? There’s serious work still to be done to make our music festivals better for women, and truly welcoming, inclusive and safe for everyone.
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Music festivals are electrifying rites of passage for music lovers. They let us dig deep into our adoration for our favourite bands and artists – up close, if we’re lucky. We connect with our friends, and with a community of passionate, like-minded people; we hear new acts, we catch new crazes, we soak it all in.
But that’s not everyone’s experience of music festivals. While women make up at least half of all festival ticket buyers, an alarming number of women have reported sexual harassment or violence at festivals. As UK researcher Dr Hannah Bows put it last year, “There are more women than ever going to music festivals, but they are not free to enjoy them in the same way as men.” And it’s not just the case for audiences: female artists may be harassed when they perform and, until very recently, nearly all mainstream festivals had line-ups that were overwhelmingly dominated by men.
Diversity on festival line-ups has improved, especially over the last five years, but line-ups are the tip of the iceberg. The problem, at its heart, is the culture of music festivals, and of the industry that powers them: it still favours men, and it still excuses men for bad behaviour towards the industry’s women, gender-diverse people and anyone who doesn’t fit a confident, hyper-masculine mould. So how do all these elements – line-ups, the music industry, audience cultures – knit together to create such inequality for women as artists and audiences? And what can we do to dismantle it, stitch by stitch?
Festival his-story •
Historically, music festival line-ups have openly favoured men, whether in pop, rock, dance, metal, punk or any other subgenre. The stages at the big pop music festivals in the 1960s and ’70s were virtually men-only. Woodstock in 1969 had just ten women on its stage out of all the members of its thirty-two acts. At the first Sunbury festival in 1972, just outside Melbourne, an audience of about 35,000 gathered to see thirty acts – featuring just one woman (bluesy vocal powerhouse Wendy Saddington). All the biggest pop music festivals – think Coachella and Lollapalooza in the US; Glastonbury, Reading and Leeds in the UK; and the Big Day Out, Splendour and Falls in Australia – had male-weighted line-ups for decades.
Questions were raised about the gender balance over the years, but it was not until recently that a flurry of research revealed, in stark numbers, the extent of the problem. A survey by Pitchfork on twenty international festivals in 2018 found that 30 per cent of acts on festival line-ups had one or more female members – that means 70 per cent of the acts on stage that year had no female members at all. When you count headline acts, the figures are even worse: a 2022 BBC study found that only 13 per cent of headline acts at UK music festivals included a woman. And this is not even about female-led acts; a band qualifies if it has, say, one female bass player flanked by eight guys.
Around 2018, social media accounts like Book More Women and LineupsWithoutMales emerged to highlight the sorry state of the stats, and campaigns to improve the numbers kicked off. The Keychange initiative gives festivals the chance to commit to having 50 per cent of acts featuring at least one woman, and many UK and European festivals have signed up. One festival that didn’t need the pledge was Spain’s Primavera Sound, a multi-city event that last year attracted more than 400,000 attendees. In 2019, half of its acts featured women – Rosalía, Lizzo, Janelle Monáe and Robyn among them – and the gender balance has continued ever since. “It was easy for us not to stick to a pre-made quota, but trying to pick the music that we really liked most,” Primavera’s Marta Pallarès observed in 2020. “If you’re passionate about music … it’s quite weird that you are just sticking to music made by white males playing guitars.” Primavera co-director Alfonso Lanza backed this up, telling Stereogum this year that gender parity “was not a one-time campaign, but a commitment forever”.
In Australia, one prominent voice has been that of Holly Rankin, aka Jack River, a phenomenally busy pop artist who adds her influence to political and social causes. In 2017, before she’d even released her debut album, she created the Electric Lady online platform and live music events, with all-female line-ups. “I thought, ‘Let’s show the industry that we can fill a line-up completely of women and it will sell,’” she recalls. “It was a national issue that equal line-ups weren’t being made between women and men. Understanding and implementing the importance of diverse, First Nations and LGBTQI+ communities wasn’t as realised as it is now.” The Electric Lady shows sold plenty of tickets, and there was no shortage of talent.
Yet you’ll still hear arguments trotted out against gender parity on festival line-ups. A sample: there aren’t as many talented women as men; women aren’t as successful; women don’t play in enough bands; there are too few women who can sell the required number of tickets.
Vick Bain, UK music industry researcher and campaigner, and president of the Independent Society of Musicians, disagrees vehemently with all of these. To prove the depth of female talent on offer, she created The F-List, an online database of UK-based female artists who are ready, willing and more than able to sell tickets. At last count, there were about 6000 acts on it, giving booking agents one less flimsy excuse for only booking blokes. The claim that female artists can’t sell enough tickets is a complete fiction, says Bain. “A few years ago, people were saying, ‘Oh, it’s about economics and ticket sales’, but it isn’t, actually. The major festivals that have really gone for gender equality have told me they’ve sold more tickets.” Plus many of the bigger festivals will sell out before they’ve even announced their line-ups, so adding more women literally can’t harm their sales.
As for the talent-pool excuse – that there aren’t enough female musicians available – initiatives like the F-List prove that’s nonsense. The list is UK-focused, but the depth and breadth of bankable female talent in other music markets is just as strong. “Some festivals have told me they use it for inspiration,” Bain says. “But there’s still work to do with the industry, in investing and booking and signing women.” Which brings us to the next obstacle: the music industry itself.
Unblocking the pipeline •
If a female artist isn’t signed to a record deal, she’s far less likely to be put forward for a festival or live event. Record labels, venues and booking agents have immense power to support and develop artists’ careers, yet we know that the music industry “pipeline” still overwhelmingly supports more men than women. The vast majority of record label CEOs and presidents are men, as are around three-quarters of A&R reps – the people who sign up new acts – according to a recent study by the University of Southern California. In the UK, Vick Bain’s 2019 report Counting the Music Industry revealed that 80 per cent of acts signed to a record label, major or independent, did not include any women at all. In other words, the recording industry is still a dudefest.
This pipeline for female artists became a hot-button issue this year when Glastonbury Festival’s Emily Eavis defended choosing all-male headliners for its 2023 line-up. An unnamed female headliner, rumoured to be Taylor Swift, dropped out and was replaced with Guns N’ Roses (noted: they tour with a female keyboardist, Melissa Reese). During her time as co-organiser of Glastonbury, Eavis has made huge improvements to the gender diversity on its stages, yet she defended the headliner decision, telling The Guardian, “We’re trying our best so the pipeline needs to be developed. This starts way back with the record companies [and] radio.”
The “pipeline problem” is real, but Vick Bain still found Eavis’s approach puzzling. “I don’t know why she’s made that decision to have all male headliners. That was such a shame,” she says. It’s disappointing because festivals can also create demand for performers. They are not just reactive; in fact, festival bookers talk up their knack for finding new acts. “Every festival promoter I’ve ever met really prides themselves on having the magical eye for talent. They’re the tastemakers,” says Bain. Which means that a festival can throw its weight behind an act – an emerging act, a female-led act, or one that represents diverse communities – then use the festival’s reputation and budget to scatter some magic publicity dust, which in turn helps the artist build their career, stage by stage, getting them a better record deal, more fans and more bargaining power. Festivals are part of the pipeline; they are not separate from it. They can, and should, be making a difference.
Yet some festivals still choose to direct their efforts towards a masculine festival culture, glibly batting away legitimate concerns. In February this year, Bluesfest, one of Australia’s best known music events, announced that Sydney-based rockers Sticky Fingers, “the bad boys of Australian music”, would be “playing one of their all-too-rare shows” at the upcoming festival. The backlash to the announcement came almost immediately, thanks to the chequered history of the band’s frontman. In 2016, Sticky Fingers’ lead singer Dylan Frost had argued – publicly and physically – with Indigenous Australian singer/songwriter Thelma Plum and her then-partner. Plum posted online about its impact on her, and received a stream of abuse on social media by aggrieved Sticky Fingers fans. Frost revealed via Facebook that he was seeking treatment for bipolar schizophrenia and addiction issues. Then, two years later, his position morphed into a sorry-not-sorry: in an interview with Triple J’s Hack, Frost admitted that while there was “violence in my past under the influence”, it had also been a case of “fucking boys will be boys, you know?”
So, when Bluesfest announced Sticky Fingers would be on its 2023 bill, social media lit up. Pop singer/songwriter and advocate Jaguar Jonze tweeted her disbelief, as did all-female rockers Camp Cope, who have long campaigned against sexual harassment in the industry. Coverage in major news outlets followed, further controversies involving Dylan Frost came to light, and Bluesfest dug in to stand by their band. Then psychedelic rockers King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard pulled out of the festival, as did Sampa The Great; the statement from Sampa’s team noted that safety was a priority for her. Then, two weeks after the first announcement, Sticky Fingers were off the line-up too. Bluesfest director Peter Noble laid the blame squarely at the feet of the band’s critics: “I believe an attempt to victimise this man and his band in the circumstances is cruel and unforgiving,” he announced. There was no admission of mishandling.
“I think that was really disappointing,” says Dr Bianca Fileborn, a criminologist at the University of Melbourne. She has researched sexual harassment and violence at music festivals in Australia, and sees a clear pattern in the Bluesfest episode that is repeated in the music industry at large. “It ties into a broader cultural attitude that still persists, which is ‘Our boys will be boys and it’s just rock and roll, and it’s just part of the industry.’” Trumpeting anyone as “bad boys” speaks volumes about who you want to attract to your festival, and shows a barefaced disregard for anyone who isn’t part of that overconfident, hetero-masculine crowd. “Taking this kind of attitude tells you something about who’s welcome in that space,” Fileborn says. “And it’s not women, and it’s not marginalised people.”
Cultural shift •
The Bluesfest episode shines a light on another pervasive part of the problem: the overall culture of music festivals – especially the bigger ones – for artists, audiences and those who work behind the scenes. A YouGov study in the UK in 2018 found that almost a third of all female attendees had been subjected to sexual harassment or assault at a festival. Bianca Fileborn was part of a research team that interviewed audience members at Australia’s Falls Festival in 2017–18 to find out how sexual harassment and violence were impacting them. Participants reported an alarming range of unwanted sexual behaviours, yet at the same time, 61 per cent of people said they felt “mostly safe” or “always safe” at festivals generally, even while 88 per cent said they believed that festivals were sites of sexual assaults.
It’s a paradox, Fileborn explains. “People genuinely do feel safe, most of the time, at these events,” she observes. “You’re there usually with your friends. You feel like you belong in the space. But there are also a lot of environmental and cultural sectors of these events that facilitate sexual harassment and sexual violence.” Sexual comments, deliberate touching and groping are the most common types of harassment reported. But the violence can be far worse: women have been sexually assaulted at festival campsites, and in densely packed crowds and moshpits.
Women are clearly still attending festivals, despite knowing that this behaviour does occur. But even if they do not feel “unsafe”, they usually have a radically different experience in the crowd than men do – and may not even realise it. As Fileborn discovered, “people, particularly women, will sometimes quite profoundly change their behaviour at festivals” to avoid harassment. They may keep away from the stage, even for a favourite band they’d love to see up close, and stand at the back where there is more space. “There was also a sense of wanting to feel in control, and not trusting men,” says Fileborn. “They are hypervigilant, they’re on guard, which really limits women’s ability to immerse themselves in the festival space in the same way that a lot of cis, hetero, white, able-bodied men are able to.”
While some may think it’s trivial to complain about not being able to “let go” at a festival, it’s clearly not a problem that’s equally shared. “Music is such a huge part of our lives and of people’s sense of identity – for everyone, but especially for young people,” Fileborn argues. So why should it only be the rowdier, confident and blokey kind of music lover who can go to a festival and really live in the moment? Many female artists, too, have to be on high alert for harassment when they play live. “Festivals and live gigs can be very problematic for female artists in being harassed when they’re on stage or off stage – verbal harassment and even physical touching,” says Vick Bain. “They have to develop a very, very thick skin.” Bianca Fileborn agrees: “It’s often seen as just ‘part of the deal’. And it’s often excluding women from fully participating in the production of cultural goods.” Which means this masculinised culture can stop female and diverse artists from making music at all; it may mean that female artists choose to not play a festival, or go on tour, and that will directly affect their careers.
Fileborn and her colleagues recommended lots of ways to make festivals safer for performers and audiences, including “cultural change”. And the key recommendation for sparking cultural change? No surprises: get more women and diverse artists on line-ups. “Having more women and queer people on the line-up changes the tone,” says Fileborn. “If you’ve got a really male-dominated line-up, that’s immediately telling you something about who’s valued in that space, and what the role of women and gender-diverse folk is. And it’s not as the main attraction; it’s not as people who are in a position of power and influence.”
More women on festival line-ups sends a powerful message: these are the artists we revere; these are the people we are here to see. More women and more people of diverse gender identity on our stages doesn’t just say that we respect them. It declares, loud and clear, that we revere them artistically as much as we revere men. And that can deliver a powerful jolt of awareness to those who need it.
The festival fix •
So what might the ideal, diversity-friendly festival look like? For Vick Bain, it would be one that just flat-out made everyone feel welcome, without anyone having to pretend to be “one of the lads”. More female security staff, and female-friendly staff, would be a start, and better facilities for female performers, like dressing rooms and bathrooms, which are notoriously poor. “And I know the phrase is bandied around a lot, but zero tolerance for any audience members who think it’s OK to get mouthy and verbally abusive towards female artists. And definitely having less aggressive moshpits in the front of the band, so you feel like you can’t get closer to the stage.”
As the creator of two festivals – Electric Lady, and Grow Your Own in her hometown of Forster, New South Wales – Holly Rankin has a few things on her wishlist. “The first one is the line-ups being booked: that there is representation from all communities, and that it doesn’t seem tokenistic,” she says. “If a festival has a loaded male line-up, I won’t do it until it changes. There is enough talent out there to be thoughtful and original with your line-up, [not just] loading the lower end of the line-up with females or diverse communities and adding male headliners.” On the ground, access issues are still a problem too. “I look out for physical spaces for disabled people. At music festivals, there’s a lot of stairs, and things going on over different platforms and heights. Access at festivals still has a long way to go.” Then there’s the culture around festival security. “Security staff need to be well briefed to the culture of the festival, and be caring,” she says. “We need police who are respectful and understanding of the importance of the festival and why young people are there – why they’re doing what they’re doing and feeling what they’re feeling.”
Bianca Fileborn’s wishlist also begins with the music: “Having a diverse line-up that has a good spread of women, of queer musicians, of people of colour and First Nations artists – I think that that’s really, really central.” Like Vick Bain, she would like to see zero tolerance of any harassment, plus more services that minimise the possible harms of drugs and alcohol, and on-site support for anyone who’s been harassed or assaulted. “And having messaging about sexual consent and respect is important,” she adds. “It’s not going to solve everything, but it at least helps to set the tone.”
Many of Fileborn’s interviewees said they especially liked it when artists called out bad behaviour from the stage, and it’s something Holly Rankin doesn’t think twice about doing. During one of her festival performances, when she noticed a male attendee’s behaviour causing a disturbance, she stopped her band midway through the set – a difficult decision for any artist. But Rankin is adamant that it’s necessary, and is another way artists can use their position on the stage for good. “When you’re performing, it’s a hard mental space to jump into, to stop a show. But you’ve got to call it out. If I saw anything happening in my line of view, I’d make sure I did something about it.”
If anything is going to change, we have to demand more – not just women, but everyone. Male allies are crucial too. As King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard said when they withdrew from Bluesfest, “Sometimes you need to be willing to make sacrifices to stand up for your values.” No one is at their best when they are overlooked and pushed to the margins, or when they are made to feel unwelcome, uneasy or unsafe. Only when we all relentlessly question the way the music industry operates for women and diverse communities, and actively support all the artists making great music or who have that potential, will we see a festival scene that is truly equal. •