This week me and my 3rd year Audio production course received a guest lecture by Katia Isakoff. Katia is a music artist and producer who has worked on a range of projects like co-founding West London studio UNIT20 with producer Steve D’Agostino in the mid-90s, lending vocals to composer and musician Barry Adamson and doing various guitar performances which have featured in a Stephen Spielberg TV series.

Katia began the lecture by introducing women produce music. Women produce music is an new organisation founded by Katia and music producer Richard James Burgess with the aim of promoting the work of talented woman music producers. Katia made it clear that women produce music is not hardcore feminist or exclusive to promoting only women music producers and showed us at least 50% of the organisation is men by pointing out the male and female staff members. Katia continued to explain how women produce music acts as a 2 way street between academia and the industry that provides support for music producers.

Katia pointed out the steps that herself and Richard James Burgess took to establish women produce music. Katia presented findings in a women as music producers research project to various organisations then established the UK music equality and diversity committee. To build social media presence before the launch of Women produce music Katia created social networking accounts on facebook and twitter. The twitter account currently has over a thousand followers.

Katia then spoke about the state of the press, cultural attitudes and music industry around women as music producers. Katia pointed out that the press tend to focus on asking questions around female inequality in the music industry as opposed to promoting the work of women producers. On a music producers panel Katia explained how when they discuss women producing music that some people are part of the ‘blaming culture’. Katia expressed how she isn’t going to stop asking controversial questions because she doesn’t want people to retreat from the discussion but really wants to everyone to debate and discuss these topics then find a common ground to move on. Katia then went through a range of examples of women music producers such as Sylvia Massy and how they used social media to engage with record labels.

Katia finished her lecture by highlighting how record labels are watching music producers activity and if interested the label will share their activity to reach a wider audience. I asked Katia if mainstream press will highlight more of the work from women music producers in the future to which she responded ‘yes’ as long as the few persistent organisations and individuals continue to share and promote their own music based work.

From this lecture I learnt the power of being persistent in promoting and sharing ideas on social media. If interested record labels could share your work to their followers which creates greater audience awareness of your music based work.