Creating Inclusion and Diversity in the Music Industry : the role of curation

Women and minorities continue to be underrepresented in multiple areas of the Western music industry, in part due to curatorial decisions. Curation is the act or process of selecting, organising and programming; a term mainly encountered within visual arts. This paper will borrow the concept to express all the processes that go into booking, hiring, programming and commissioning people in the music industry, and explore its role in the diversity issue. Through their decisions, curators have significant influence on who receives opportunity and praise which, subsequently, results in the facilitation of either inclusivity or exclusion. Statistics show that women and minorities continue to receive fewer opportunities, experience bias, and drop out of higher music education, all of which has consequences for the diversity of the music industry. In addition to curatorial processes, part of the industry issues can be connected to the work environment women and minorities encounter. The dominant artistic-, corporate- and political cultures of Western societies have largely been defined by male modes of discourse and continue to function as, consciously or subconsciously, exclusive networks maintained by curatorial decisions. The discourses and expressions of women and minorities are as a consequence facing bias and have slimmer chances of making it ‘onto display’. Relational leadership and inclusive curation offer tools to help establishing lasting and inclusive diversity by challenging the curatorial processes and discourses that keep the excluding structures in place. Thereby room is made for experimentation, new modes of expression, and diverse cultural discourses in the music industry