There’s a lot to get excited about in the 2018 Splendour In The Grass lineup.
Kendrick Lamar is coming back, at the height of his powers. Lorde is bringing her Melodrama live show to Byron too, and with Khalid appearing as an Australian exclusive too, they might team up onstage to perform their ‘Homemade Dynamite’ remix. Franz Ferdinand, MGMT, Girl Talk and The Wombats are all on there – a treat for those who wish it was still 2006!
And the lineup of Aussie artists is, as always, possibly more exciting than the headliners.
She’s excited too!
But this year has seen festival lineups copping extra scrutiny for the gender balance of their lineups, thanks to a few years of solid campaigning and a particularly vocal effort from Melbourne’s foremost feminist DIY rock heroes, Camp Cope.
When they played Falls Festival over the New Year period, the band called out organisers Secret Sounds – the same team behind Splendour – for not having enough women on the lineup, and for not backing the female artists they did book to pull large audiences. (They said this to an afternoon crowd so packed in that it spilled beyond the edges of the tent.)
Secret Sounds even took the unusual step of sending out a pretty defensive statement via email, quibbling with a few of the numbers in triple j’s analysis of the Falls and Splendour lineups’ gender balance.
All this means there were plenty of eyes on the Splendour announcement for 2018.
So how did they do?
GOAT counted up each artist and broke it down into three categories: acts that were solo men or all-male bands (blue in the graph above), acts that were solo women or all-female bands (green), and acts with a mix of genders (yellow).
With 58 all-male acts, 27 all-female, and 16 mixed acts, the numbers still aren’t great.
The best news for Splendour is the proportion of all-male to “non-all-male” acts, which shakes out to around 58% to 42%.
“Forty percent women” is a decent minimum to aim for – plenty of recently developed gender guidelines suggest a “40/40/20” model, where the middle 20% can be whatever as long as there are 40% each of men and women (and also allows for the inclusion of people who don’t fit into the gender binary).
But it’s not “40% women”, because that figure includes the “mixed” acts in the “female representation” half. Out of all those 16 bands, only Superorganism have more than one woman (they’ve got three). That 42% also includes Jungle Giants, West Thebarton, and Ball Park Music, as bands that count one solitary woman amongst its members.
If you look at it this way, the bands that are all dudes noticeably outnumber the bands that are not. Let’s just say the queues for the ladies’ backstage are going to be on the shorter side.
There are, in fact, more than twice as many all-male acts as all-female – and in the mixed group, men are still the majority.
Roughly 40% isn’t actually terrible – and it’s a huge improvement when you consider that a measly 31% of the acts on last year’s lineup had one or more women.
Obviously an essentially even split is ideal – and it wouldn’t be the worst if some years saw women and femmes being a little overrepresented, given how long it’s been consistently the other way around.
And it’s also good to see that some of the most exciting names on the list – from internationals like Superorganism and Soccer Mommy to awesome young queer artists like Alex The Astronaut and G Flip – are women.
But the headliners skew significantly towards men. The first 26 acts listed include 21 all-male acts, four with one woman, and one solo female artist. That’s a REALLY dude-heavy top few lines.
Brainstorming an Australian festival lineup in 2018.
And out of the 18 international names, only four are or include women: Chvrches, Superorganism, Lorde and Soccer Mommy. While an artist on, say, Soccer Mommy’s level likely won’t be pocketing as big a fee as a big-name local like Angus & Julia Stone, that’s still a huge chunk of the talent budget being spent on dudes.
“Whilst we have a very conscious and strong agenda to book female talent, it isn’t always available to us at that headline level,” organiser Jessica Ducrou said in the statement released earlier this year. “We have a long term strategy … of giving opportunities to new and middle range female Australian artists, to nurture and grow the future pool of female headline option.”
That’s all well and good. But those big-name headliners, not just the overall strength of the lineup as a whole, is what sells tickets. And anchoring a bill with a slew of dudes, then booking lots of wonderfully talented and compelling but lesser-known women to fill out the rest of your lineup, means that men are still the main event.
Not many people were expecting, say, Camp Cope to be headlining Splendour this year. And listing the dozens of wildly popular female artists with strong Australian fanbases who could have played – and may well have been approached and turned Splendour down – would be patronising, and educated guessing at best anyway.
But the fact is, the old “we tried to get lots of women headliners but for some reason only a whole bunch of men were available” just won’t fly in 2018.
If your strategy is about helping women get from the middle range to the main stage, at some point you’re going to have to actually put them there.