Musicians Call for Legislative Action to Combat Misogyny, Bullying Across UK Music Industry

LONDON — Musicians and creator groups are calling upon the British government to take legislative action to help end the “endemic” misogyny, bullying and discrimination that many female artists still routinely face throughout the industry.

“We need a cultural change in the music industry… and the only way that can happen is if people are educated and there are consequences to their actions,” Charisse Beaumont, CEO of Black Lives in Music (BLiM), told a cross-party committee of MPs on Tuesday (Jan. 28).

Appearing alongside Beaumont at the Parliamentary session was singer-songwriter Celeste, classical soprano singer Lucy Cox and Naomi Pohl, general secretary of the U.K. Musicians’ Union, who all echoed calls for greater protections and support for women working across all sectors of the music business, particularly those in freelance employment.

“What is most prevalent in my daily experience of being a female in the music industry is this idea of an ingrained bias or even an unconscious sexist bias,” Celeste told MPs.

“I think that all women will deal with it but there will be a scale of how much you [encounter it]. I can imagine that what I might experience might be different to an artist who is on a global scale and I know, for example, from some of my close friends and peers who are just starting out in music … [that they] experience things that I haven’t experienced when I have had the protection of already being established,” said the singer, whose debut album, Not Your Muse, topped the U.K. charts in 2021.

Beaumont called on the current Labour government to enact the original recommendations made by the Women and Equalities Committee (WEC) in its highly critical report “Misogyny in Music,” published last January.

That report painted a damning picture of the music business as an industry “still routinely described as a boys club” where a “culture of silence” prevailed with many victims of sexual harassment or abuse afraid to report such incidents.

It followed an inquiry into misogyny in the U.K. music industry, which began in June 2022 and saw artists and executives give evidence, including senior executives from all three major labels, representatives of the live industry, former BBC Radio 1 DJ Annie Mac and British pop singer and Ivors Academy board director Rebecca Ferguson.

In response, the committee made a number of recommendations, including banning the use of non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) and other forms of confidentiality clauses in cases involving sexual abuse, bullying or misconduct, as well as stronger rights for freelance music workers, nearly all of which were rejected by the then-Conservative government.

With Sir Keir Starmer‘s Labour Party now in power, musicians and artist representatives used Tuesday’s catch-up session with committee members as an opportunity to exert pressure on politicians to act.

In a statement, Beaumont said her organization had heard “hundreds” of stories from women about harassment they had faced in the music industry, including being “sexually assaulted by male artists, as well as promoters, [and] people assaulting women in music education” since the launch of its anonymous survey YourSafetyYourSay in April.

BLiM’s chief executive also described accounts of young women being pressured to take part in “almost naked casting videos” and feeling “pressured to drink and take drugs,” as well as “male producers grooming young female vocalists.”

Black Lives in Music reports that 71% of respondents to its anonymous survey feel that bullying and harassment is accepted as being part of the industry they work in and only 29% feel there are people in their U.K. music business who will protect them.

NDAs are frequently used to protect perpetrators, says the organization, which identifies a normalization of harassment and objectification of women in the industry, particularly Black women. These problems are often underreported, says BLiM, as women fear the consequences and lack of support.

“Often there is no recourse or accountability, so reporting incidents is futile as those doing the bullying control the narrative. It’s happening under their watch and they are too powerful,” said Beaumont in a statement following Tuesday’s session.

BLiM said its research into bullying and harassment in the British music business will be made available to the newly formed U.K. body The Creative Industries Independent Standards Authority (CIISA), which has the remit of upholding and improving standards of behavior across the creative industries, including music, and is due to officially launch later this year.