The lack of women in mainstream music festival lineups doesn’t reflect the gender makeup of summer fest-goers – so what gives?

by Sara Glesne

Campgrounds and parks that remained relatively empty during winter and spring are now filling with pop-up stages, food and drink vendors, slews of teens and twenty-somethings, and, most importantly, acts ranging from well-established performers with monstrous followings like Prince and Weezer to lesser-known up-and-comers like Australian singer-songwriter duo The Falls or Quebec garage punk darlings King Khan & BBQ Show. Pitchfork, Coachella and Bonnaroo are just a few big names in the mainstream music festival world, and whether they’ve already closed their curtains or are revving up for weekends of multi-stage madness, there’s one thing missing from all the hubbub: a fair representation of women in music.

The rate of women’s inclusion at music fests was called into question this spring when NYC-based writer Sophy Ziss and musician Mariel Loveland teamed up to create a series of animated GIFs demonstrating just how underwhelming some festivals’ lineups are for fans hoping to see acts with even one non-male member.

Across the board, the percentages and breakdowns don’t look friendly to women. This year, California’s two-weekend arts and music fest Coachella slotted acts with female members for just 16 percent of their lineup. Chicago’s Riot Fest, whose lineup had 87 percent all-male acts last year, announced its first wave of acts for September and of the 26 bands highlighted, just two included female members.

The gender makeup of festival lineups fails to reflect the crowd whose members sometimes shell out upwards of $200 for tickets (Bonnaroo’s were $269 this season; their VIP package a startling $1,449.50). In a 2014 study by eventbrite, at least 55 percent of music festival attendees were women. That same year, a study by Nielsen found that around 32 million Americans attend music festivals annually. In their sample, 51 percent of attendees were women.

Even smaller scale music festivals are guilty of letting men commandeer their lineups.  Scrolling through the lineup of Des Moines, Iowa’s 80/35 Music Festival, which took place this past weekend, 10 of the 42 acts include at least one woman. One of these is second tier headliner Jenny Lewis, whose most recent album features the single “Just One of the Guys,” a testament to the difficulty of carrying the expectations of being a woman when trying to fit in with a crowd of men. She sings, “There’s only one difference between you and me / When I look at myself, all I can see: / I’m just another lady without a baby / No matter how hard I try to be just one of the guys.”

Lewis’s jab at sexism is ranked #5 on Rolling Stone’s list of the 50 best songs of 2014. The list has an almost equal number of artists with and without women in its rankings (to be precise, 22 with and 28 without; 14 of those are solo female acts compared with nine solo men). The number one spot went to Beyoncé’s ode to booze-driven passion, “Drunk in Love.” While the formula behind the rankings seems to just be critics’ choice the article does portray a major music industry where women are making noteworthy music, at least by critics’ standards.

Beyond those rankings, record sales point toward an industry dominated by powerful and successful women. In 2014, the top five slots on the Billboard Hot 100 chart were held by female artists for six consecutive weeks for the first time in the chart’s history. In November of that same year, Taylor Swift became the first solo female artist to oust herself from the top spot with another of her songs (first “Shake It Off,” then “Blank Space” which remained at number one into the second week of January 2015).

Given the current makeup of crowds at fests and the power-house female pop stars out there, it seems unlikely that a lack of presence at fests is linked to female acts lacking ambition or mass appeal to fans.

Still, pop acts do not rank as top priority for festival bookers. Coachella has featured eclectic lineups over the years, but between 1999 and today has averaged less than five percent pop acts. Genre-wise, that fest’s tendencies have mostly favored indie, electronic, hip-hop, rap, house and dance over rock and punk, too. This could perhaps be in part due to competition between more rock and punk-focused fests like Riot Fest or Van’s Warped Tour. It’s possible that if the focus was on pop, the gender dynamic might be more balanced at music fests, but for now the lineups remain stacked in favor of men.

Beyond genre, the drive to attract sponsors guides those who are booking these events. The expanding field of competition brought on by the creation of new fests annually combined with a limited number of book-able acts leads some to speculate fests are chipping away at their economically viable lifespan. Still, revenue from festivals remains mostly lucrative. From 2007 to 2013, Coachella saw a leap in ticket sale revenue from $17 million to $47.3 million between growing attendance and rising ticket prices. This difference fueled the push to expand the fest to two weekends rather than one, according to Fortune Magazine.

FRUKT reported that at least 447 companies sponsored 300 music festivals internationally in 2013. But sponsors don’t necessarily make a profit at every fest. Anheuser Busch’s Vice President Paul Chibe told Fortune that his company actually lost money sponsoring its own fest outside of Philadelphia (Budweiser Made in America Festival). Yet Chibe said the loss was worth it since, “Music is a key part of who people are. It’s a powerful pathway to create [a] relationship with the consumer.”

Sponsors seek connections with fest-goers through a technique called experiential marketing. They build mini-villages around branded merchandise from Budweiser to Jäger to Nike including logo-splattered backdrops for festival attendees to pose in front of and hashtag on Instagram or Twitter. They send representatives with free samples to roam the grounds. It’s a scheme to get the most mentions and page hits and according to AdAge, budgets have been steadily shifting toward this style of marketing since 2011. The most common sponsors at fests include beer, liquor and banks.

If advertisers are zeroing in on ways to connect with crowds at summer fests, it seems odd they haven’t done anything about the discrepancies between audience members and the acts onstage. In a world where sponsors hold significant economic leverage, they could be doing a lot more to demand a more equitable stage at music festivals.

As rock critic Julianne Escobedo Shepherd told Salon, “What it really comes down to is that booking companies either don’t care or think about the fact that everyone they are booking are men.”

No one’s expecting a perfect 50-50 split of male and female acts. After all, the music industry is not a perfect beacon of parity between sexes. Still, women attendees might relate more to the “experience” – and, ahem, participate more heartily in that experiential marketing – if they saw more faces and bodies like their own onstage.

While it should be unnecessary to point out solid female acts when airwaves and record stores are teeming with them, I can’t help but offer up a list of suggestions of acts to consider for future fests (while I commend those who have already booked these or similar acts with women): Angel Olsen, FKA Twigs, Priests, Warpaint, Sleater-Kinney, La Luz, Babes in Toyland, Zella Day, St. Vincent, Wavves, Waxahatchee, Joanna Gruesome, Sia, Haim, Grimes, Ibeyi.

Really, it feels a little condescending to throw these out here. We all know these babes rock. So, let’s let them rock the next summer’s music fests.

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Sara is a Minneapolis-based writer, sassy polyglot and amateur cartoonist. Talk music with her at s.glesne@gmail.com