Out of the 127 total artists on Billboard's Power 100 List for 2015, 15 of the acts were female. (Never mind that Lana Del Rey made the cover of the magazine the very week the list was published.)
PRS for Music found out that out of 95,000 composers and songwriters, just 13% were born female.
Less than 5% of established engineers and producers in the music industry are women.
When it comes to people in said profession making at least $30,000 per year, 22% of men in the field get to bring home that kind of bacon...but only 6% of women do.
And according to Creative & Cultural Skills, men have 68% of all the jobs in the music industry, women the remaining 32%.
All the jobs...and that, of course, includes Del Rey and other recording artists.
Seems as if, since the 20th Century came to an end, the percentage of women placing their tunes on Billboard's various US music charts has dwindled...even with Taylor Swift, Beyonce Knowles, Carrie Underwood, Iggy Azalea, and some other big names joining Del Rey at the top.
It's not just in rock or country or hip-hop/R&B [with hip-hop/R&B having a long history of being more paternalistic than the other aforementioned forms of music...which, in part, might be understandable when you consider the great lengths America's biggest social-and-cultural leaders (and leaders of other kinds) have gone to ever since the early 17th Century to treat African-American males as less than human beings, let alone as adults, in addition to denying any manhood in African-American males].
That's another can of worms in itself.
Anyway, I've noticed how the percentage of female performers competing in the World Championship Old-Time Piano Playing Contest and Festival (this year's event takes place in Oxford, MS, next month) has been evaporating since the current century got under way. (In 1999, seven female contestants went at it, at a time when the Holiday Inn Select in Decatur, IL, was the contest site; the next year, six did.) Thus far this year, only one woman- first-time Regular Division contestant Anita Malhotra, from Gatineau, QC, Canada- has pledged to go after the Big Money.
Last year, the final Illinois (East Peoria) OTPP iteration saw five female pianists- four in the Junior Division- step up to the challenge. And the Reg Division would've been a fraternity for the second straight year if contest coordinator Faye Ballard hadn't signed up to join JDs Nina Freeman, Megan Jobe, Mia Yara, and Amberlyn Aimone.
Besides being in a ragtime club here in the Omaha/Council Bluffs/Bellevue area, I'm in the local chapter of the American Theatre Organ Society. When I joined the River City Theatre Organ Society in late 1984 (and subsequently got involved in ATOS, too), several women were concertizing all over at least the United States on Mighty Wurlitzers and on competing brands of theater pipe organs.
Since then, only Donna Parker and Patti Simon Zollman are still out there
...having outlasted equally-outstanding organists like Melissa Ambrose and Candi Carley-Roth. [In addition, death robbed the world of Edna Sellers (in 1989) and her daughter, Barbara Sellers Matranga (who passed away in 2014). And those deaths sandwiched that of Rosa Rio (in 2010).]
Been thinking about all of this for the last few days, and I've got just one question about all this:
"What in the world happened to put more women and girls on music's sidelines?"
Even with YouTube, Vimeo, and other video-oriented sites right here on the Web, the playing field (no pun intended) is still lopsided.
One of the factors skewing the whole situation came into prominence in the early 1980s.
That's right: Music videos.
Eventually, things got to the point where, if you wanted to sign a recording contract (especially if you were born with a vagina), you had to be some kind of attractive before given the chance to have something to say.
TV shows like American Idol haven't helped, either. On that now-deceased series, the judges found room for NFL-sized (and enormously-talented) Ruben Studdard, the show's 2003 champ.
Two years later, Missy, Mandy, and Erin Maynard tried out for the show...but Simon Cowell labeled the threesome as "too fat!"
Result: In today's music industry, there's no room for the Cass Elliots and Spanky McFarlands anymore. (Remember what happened to Carnie Wilson? Remember how she was treated, especially by video directors?)
Last year, Pitchfork senior editor Jessica Hopper put out a Twitter call that went like this:
The responses came by the hundreds.
I read every last one of them.
You talk about infuriating!
More often than not, this is what greets you if you're female and want to become a musician and/or vocalist. More often than not, some you-know-whats are going to tell you that you just don't belong...regardless of what you've got to say.
If you've ever been the parent of a daughter, what was your reaction when she told you that she wanted to play a musical instrument...especially one usually associated with boys?
If you're a music teacher at an elementary school (or at a middle school or a high school), if you've discouraged any female students from taking up the axes of their dreams (especially the instruments usually associated with male students), then you're part of the problem.
Admit it. Don't kid yourself.
If you've ever said or written "Girl bands suck" or "Chick bands suck," you're- let's face it- part of the problem.
It's long been time to encourage people who want to sing and/or play...regardless of gender. We need to hear as many voices as possible, and we need to take their efforts seriously.
Roughly half the people in this world are female...and music, among other activities, loses when women (and other marginalized people) aren't allowed to be heard.
After all, good is good.
You can find Hopper's Twitter call at https://storify.com/Laupina_/from-the-margins. And you're invited to visit coastalbeatsmedia.com/2016/03/29, where Gabby authored a fine post, "Editor's Essay: Women in the Music Industry," where I got some of the info found on the post you've been reading.
I belong to another music-oriented club besides the Great Plains Ragtime Society. In fact, I've been in this additional organization since 1984...the year it celebrated its first birthday.
It's the Omaha/Council Bluffs/Bellevue chapter of the American Theatre Organ Society, the River City Theatre Organ Society.
Yesterday afternoon, RCTOS put on the 2013 edition of its annual fundraiser. Every year at this time, the club holds a concert at Omaha's Rose Theater, the one-time movie house (originally called the Paramount Theater; later the Astro) whose official current title is the Rose Blumkin Center for the Performing Arts.
The place was packed.
And the talent was packed, too!
The theater's got a 3-manual, 21-rank Wurlitzer theater pipe organ that was built in 1927...and, currently, it's the only concert-ready theater organ in the Iowa-Nebraska-South Dakota area.
Getting back to the talent being packed...this year's featured organist was Walt Strony, the Illinoisan-turned-Californian who was voted ATOS' Organist of the Year not once, but twice...in both 1991 and 1993.
Right from the first chords of his opener ("On the Sunny Side of the Street"), he showed the crowd just why.
And when Walt followed that up with a medley from "My Fair Lady" and then his version of Mario Lanza's 1950 smash, "Be My Love," the Rose audience was in for one heck of a ride.
Three selections later, Walt cued a silent movie, "Two Tars." (The two tars were none other than Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy.)
Walt isn't just great. He's G-R-R-R-E-A-T!!
He and his unique style hit the theater-organ circuit in 1974 (at a time when Walt was 18)...at a time when RCTOS' 2008 featured organist, Donna Parker, was in her teens as well (and playing the organ at Los Angeles Dodgers games).
After the showing of a movie that still proves to be some kind of funny, it was intermission time.
And after Walt came back out and fired up another number, the Pathfinders (a barbershop chorus group from Fremont, NE) took to the Rose Theater stage.
Last year, when Rob Richards played the Rose Wurlitzer, the Pathfinders turned out the concert with their movin', groovin' brand of a cappella singing...and proved to be so great that RCTOS invited them to come back for 2013.
The Pathfinders opened with a song called "Harmony" to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the International Barbershop Harmony Society...then brought back a tune they did in 2012, the 1967 hit "Lazy Day." ("Lazy Day" was how Spanky and Our Gang followed up their debut hit, "Sunday Will Never Be the Same.")
Fremont's Number One plus factor (well, I like to think so!) does the old, old ones, too...like "The Sweetheart of Sigma Chi."
One of the Pathfinders used to run RCTOS. His name is Greg Johnson, and he's no slouch as an organist, either.
Greg's successor as the club's president is no slouch, either. His name is Bob Markworth...who'd just been named ATOS Member of the Year for 2013. (Bob and his wife Joyce own a 1927 Kimball 3-manual, 24-rank theater pipe organ, the instrument locally known as "The Beast in the Basement.")
Because of Greg, Bob, Joyce, and Jerry Pawlak (he's the club's secretary-treasurer), RCTOS membership grew exponentially throughout this early going of this 21st Century.
The club now has 162 members. And you can't beat that with a stick!
Well, after the barbershoppers showed how "The Joint Is Jumpin'," Walt came back out to join them.
After Walt got the show (this year's show was titled "Let's Take a Musical Stroll") going, he talked about how some people ask him to play rock songs during his theater-organ concerts.
Walt's answer is: "Forget it. You need a melody."
Guess what Walt Strony and the Pathfinders teamed up to do?
They worked out "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da."
By the Beatles.
Oh, by the way...the 'Finders (formed in 1972, the year before Donna started playing at Dodger Stadium and two years prior to Walt's first theater-organ concert) recently did their thing at the IBHS competition in Toronto, ON, Canada...and ended up winning tenth place.
That's right: The Pathfinder Chorus is one of the WORLD'S ten best barbershop choruses.
No slouches are they.
Then Walt ran the concert's anchor leg by himself, closing it all out with a patriotic medley that featured the theme song from each of America's five military branches. (He invited veterans to stand up; veterans from four of the nation's five branches did just that...with only the Coast Guard lacking representation at yesterday's show.)
The medley continued with "The Stars and Stripes Forever" and closed out (the concert did, too) with what some people feel should replace "The Star-Spangled Banner" as our national anthem: "God Bless America."
Can't wait 'til next August...to see who's going to make the joint (ahem, the Rose Theater) jump.
How about you?
