Join the month-long challenge to only listen to bands that have at least one female musician! It’s important. It’s fun. And you will discover a lot of great music to add to your playlist!

As I was flipping through Rolling Stone the other day (yah know, because I’m a sucker for magazine sales), the absence of female rock stars in the magazine was glaringly apparent. In the entire magazine, I found only 6 photos/articles/snippets about female musicians. Incredibly disappointing.

Women in music are still widely ignored. And for all of the feminist coverage in the media, somehow this topic is not being discussed. I did a few cursory searches to find out just how big of a problem this is, but found very few articles on the topic. However, the articles I did find, definitely reinforced my thoughts that Americans seem to be much more likely to listen to male musicians – oftentimes, not by choice, but by default. According to The Soundcheck Blog on WNYC “Among the over-160 artists appearing at this year’s (Coachella) festival, only 26 female-fronted acts are on the bill.”

I’m ashamed to admit, though, that my music playlist isn’t much better. While I enjoy many genres of music from EDM to jam bands to rock, most of the bands don’t have women in them at all. Don’t get me wrong, there are a lot of amazing female musicians on my playlist – and I’ve seen some phenomenal concerts (featured photo above is Phantogram, a band I had sadly never even heard of until I saw them at McDowell Mountain Music Festival) – but the ratio is definitely skewed in favor of male musicians. My guess is that your playlist is similar in its ratio of men to women musicians.

So here’s the challenge. For the entire month of August, I am only going to listen to bands that have at least one female member. I’m doing this because I know that this will force me to seek out bands and musicians that I would not find otherwise. Like most people, I don’t like to “work” at finding new music. I typically take from whatever is presented to me – on the radio, at festivals, or through friends. And somehow, that music so far has mostly been created by men. So I’m going to start putting in a little work, which I will then share with you so that you can do less work but still listen to great female musicians!

I’ve already found 2 new bands that I’m in love with:

Elle King

Purity Ring

Take a look at your own music playlists – is it male-dominated? If so, why do you think that is? Why do you think so many bands have all male band members instead of a mix of male and female?