THE MANIFESTO

Our intention with this project is to create a community-centered safe space for women and non-binary people across the music industry in which they can share their art and have real conversations about the process of music creation. We want WIP to help women and non-binary folks connect with top audio engineers who are willing to collaborate with them, have a genuine exchange of ideas, have a healthy dialog about what works, and hear and answer their questions and concerns, all in service of the music.

Since the pandemic, we’ve seen how our friends in the creative community have been increasingly struggling to afford the costs associated with living in general, let alone the costs associated with touring, or getting a song/album across the finish line. We believe that mixing and mastering are a crucial part of the production process. We want to provide a way for artists to connect with engineers who can help them discover the magic of a professionally dialed-in mix and master, and experience how this process can help bring a song to its full potential. We want to help people see this side of the music making process and remove some of the financial barriers to experiencing it.

Good communication is one of the key ingredients to successful musical collaboration. Women and gender fluid people have a special talent in communicating their thoughts and feelings in a clear and constructive way. We also possess a unique ability to use our intuition to hear the subtleties of a song in great detail. There is a nuance and specificity to the perspective of women and non-binary folks that is absolutely essential to building a healthy and inspired music community.

We believe in what women and non-binary people have to say. Our invaluable voices have been stifled and dismissed for a long time. In the Rolling Stone article “Women in Music Dwindled in 2020” Amy X. Wang says:

“The fourth annual report, conducted by USC’s Annenberg Inclusion Initiative with funding from Spotify, examined the gender and race of artists, songwriters, producers, and other creators across 900 top songs in the last nine years; across 2012 to 2020, women comprised a total 21.6% of all artists, 12.6% of all songwriters, and 2.6% of all producers.”

 Although non-binary folks are not mentioned specifically in the report, nonetheless the numbers quoted give a good indication of the overall lack of representation of the group of women, trans women, and non-binary folks as a whole.

We find this situation to be unacceptable. For this reason, it is of utmost importance to us at WIP that we do what we can to address this crisis, and to uplift and support women and non-binary folks in making their voices heard in the world of music creation and beyond.