Men still dominate the music industry. The Berlin singer-songwriter Roxanne de Bastion wants to change that. She spoke about how the decentralisation of the music industry could be the key to that change in the labore:tory at the Musicday.

Women are sadly still under-represented in the music business. According to de Bastion, this is mainly due to them being disadvantaged and chronically underrated and underestimated. In her panel, de Bastion reported on her own experiences as an independent musician who runs her own label. She repeatedly has to listen to people telling her how brave it is of her to organise her own tours and not make herself dependent on others – as a woman.

At the same time, female musicians often get worse support in their endeavours and are often overlooked, for example in the festival business. The line-up for the Reading & Leeds Festivals in 2015, one of the biggest music festivals in England, was made up of 100 Bands. Only nine of them had at least one woman in the band. De Bastion founded the network From Me To You Music (#FM2U) for independent musicians, to work against this tendency. The network is for both men and women as her concept is based on inclusion. The aim of her network is to make the music industry fairer: "There is plenty of money in the music industry, but it's just not distributed fairly." De Bastion therefore called on the technology sector ("you tech people") to join together with independent musicians. The music business could be decentralised, and moved away from the monopolised label system, with the help of new Blockchain technologies – and thereby become fairer for everyone. "When musicians like me and you tech people can get together, we can create a better and fair music business", de Bastion summed up and thereby also outlined the concept behind the focus of the Musicday.

Image: re:publica/Jan Michalko (CC BY 2.0)