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Liverpool Sound City and Sound City + Conference

Liverpool Sound City is the UK’s leading festival and conference for new music! Sound City do everything they can to champion equality and diversity across their line-up and behind the scenes. According to a survey undertaken by Pitchfork across 19 festivals in 2018, acts with at least one female made up only 30% of the line ups! This does not reflect the plethora of female talent that is thriving in the UK and US. Liverpool Sound City feel that more action must be taken to redress the balance and make music festivals of the future more inclusive for both the audience and the artists that play them.

It is for this reason that they decided to join the Keychange project to attempt to tackle this issue. Keychange is an international campaign led by PRS Foundation and supported by the Creative Europe programme of the European Union. The project invests in emerging female talent whilst encouraging festivals to sign up to a 50:50 gender balance pledge by 2022. The team are proud that Sound City is the UK’s lead festival partner for Keychange, and that their 2019 line-up showcases such a vast array of female talent, including the festival’s first ever female headliner, Mabel.

The Keychange network of festivals are making a gender balance commitment which makes sense to their own events. That is why, as the leading Keychange partner, Sound City are not only reaching for a 50:50 balance in their music festival, but also at the coinciding new music conference, Sound City+. This year’s Sound City+ conference sees over 25 female industry professionals come to BME to share their experienced wisdom and discuss some of the key issues present in the music business of today. Some of the huge female names appearing at the conference are; Parlophone’s Komali Scott-Jones, Julie Weir from Sony Music, and Erin Tonkon – Producer/Recording Engineer.

In addition to that, 56% of the Liverpool Sound City office, are female too!