The New Role of Women in MI

This year, the 52-year-old National Association of Music Dealers (NASMD) will inaugurate the first woman president in the history of the organization. Rosi Johnson, CEO of Mississippi Music in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, is a longtime member of the group, currently serving on its board as vice president, so her ascendancy to the position isn’t unexpected. But it serves as yet another in a series of important steps toward the increasing visibility of women in the MI world.

Whether you’re looking at instrument manufacturers, print publishers, music dealers, or simply the vast population of consumers (given a kickstart in recent years by robust “Girls Rock” programs around the country), women are playing a more important role than ever. There’s still plenty to work on, though – from greater outreach to aspiring female musicians to fine-tuning retail displays and training staff on customer relations, there are lots of ways to ensure that more of the world’s women feel at home in MI.

Boys’ Club No More

“I think that women are the primary decision makers in our industry, for school music especially,” says Beth Houlihan, who owns Kidder Music, based in Bloomington, Illinois. “It’s the mothers of band students and the mothers dropping their kids off at guitar lessons. And I think there’s a lot of online shopping which is also female driven. We customize our websites to appeal to that. It’s something you have to keep in mind.”

Houlihan, an MI veteran who became the first female president of Young NAMM in 1998, was part of an informal group of women who have helped change things within the industry in recent years. That women have had such a strong showing at the NAMM Dealer of the Year awards has been a sign of the fact that a welcoming atmosphere in business is the norm.

Cindy Cook, who co-owns Candyman Strings and Things in Santa Fe, New Mexico, accepted the NAMM Top 100 Dealer award for Dealer of the Year this past summer in Nashville. Cook says she’s never perceived a lack of balance in the industry.

“While attending my first NAMM Show in January 2010, I remember being incredibly impressed at the many women who either owned or managed a music retailer and were giving presentations at the NAMM U sessions,” she says. “I was pleased at the numbers of women in general walking up and down the trade floor aisles, meeting with vendors, giving talks, manning booths, and so on. There also seemed to be a majority of women on the NAMM team. I didn’t get the impression that I had found myself in a gender-biased industry at all (no ‘good ole’ boys club anywhere) and as a newbie, I immediately felt included.”

Cook says that she’s noticed a balance up and down the chain in MI. “Women hold high-level positions in the financial institutions that serve the MI industry. They are vendors. They are NAMM.”

She recalls her first Summer NAMM and watching Senseney Music president Lori Supinie accept the industry’s Dealer of the Year Award and that it didn’t even register to her that a woman was winning. “I didn’t give it a thought and I don’t think anyone else did either. The reaction was more like, ‘Wow! What an incredible store and what an amazing and deserving person that just won!’”

Supinie agrees that, in most cases, judging success based on business merits is ideal. “To succeed, it just has to be the right people involved, regardless of gender,” she says. “I’ve been fortunate to have a lot of mentors, most of whom were men – it just worked out that way. I’ve always been fortunate to have overachieving friends. I was in a class of very smart women in high school and I just never saw any limits.”

Still, many see every small step for women as cause for celebration. “Just like any other ceiling being broken, whether it’s Michael Sam’s inclusion in the NFL or whatever it might be, it’s always good blaze new paths for the future,” says Houlihan.

Clientele Change

On the other side of operations, the music industry is seeing a shift in its consumer base. Part of that is organic, as more females gain interest in instrumental genres (females have traditionally been trained as piano and violin players, rather than learning to play guitars and drums). But another factor has been an industry learning how to market to this part of the population.

Gayle Beacock, vice president at Beacock Music (another recipient of NAMM’s Dealer of the Year award) says that increased efforts from manufacturers to cater to women customers haven’t always been simple. New girl-friendly guitar designs are great, but it takes industry-wide cooperation to make sure everyone is on the same page. “I remember asking manufacturers, ‘I’ve got this new guitar, so how do I sell it?’” says Beacock.  “They couldn’t really answer. I think we can all do a better job of figuring that out, and I need to do a better job with our own sales team.”

“It’s a newer thing that we have to get into the habit of researching and not just spewing the same old thing. I think we’re just now starting to get really good at that.”

Tish Ciravolo is the founder of Daisy Rock Guitars, in many ways the most visible effort from the industry to create product for females. She says the numbers for women customers has risen dramatically in the guitar market over the last 15 years.

“When we started Daisy Rock in 2000, approximately four percent of the guitar playing population was female,” she says. “Presently we figure it to be 25-30 percent. We are seeing more and more girls pick up guitars and other fretted instruments. We’re seeing incredibly talented musicians like Orianthi, Kate Nash, Haim, and more proving that they can do everything the boys can do. My goal is to see just as many female guitarists as male guitarists playing and performing.”

New Nashville guitar shop Fanny’s Music opened five years ago with a specific mission to include women in all of their development and marketing operations. A homey store in the city’s eclectic Five Points neighborhood that includes vintage fashion along with retro electrics and acoustics (and walls full of legendary female musicians), Fanny’s has created a unique atmosphere that works to welcome females, as well as encourage men to rethink their ideas of women musicians.

“Because Taylor Swift has been in our store a couple of times and mentioned us in the press, once a week a young girl will come in who has read about us,” says store co-owner Pamela Cole. “She has inspired a million girls to get a guitar and write songs.”

Cole says the combination of strong women teachers, a well-run store, and great product can really add up to change society a bit. “Exposure, role models, and philosophy all add up to make young girls feel empowered to do anything. We have several female teachers that will help break the stereotype to male students.  We have several female employees who show customers respect and expertise.”

Similar efforts across the country have helped alter the musician landscape at all levels. At Candyman Strings and Things, the percentage of female customers has been gradually increasing over the last five years. “We have women who are retired and now have the gift of time that allows them to start playing an instrument or to get back to playing an instrument they haven’t played since high school. We’ve also seen an increase of elementary to high school-aged girls coming in for lessons, instruments, and gear. We also work closely with the public schools music programs and have seen an increase of women filling the music teacher positions.”

Shop Adjustments

As these shifts in the market toward a more balanced consumer base occur, retail stores are gradually changing to reflect them. Guitar Center made waves four years ago when it began a mission to research and improve its relationship with female consumers. Laura Taylor, who is GC’s vice president of operations, was chosen to lead that effort.

“I and my boss at the time, Gene Joly, who’s the president of Musician’s Friend now, were having discussions about what we could improve in our stores,” she says. “One of the things that came up was how do we handle different cultures, different types of music, and of course different genders. I’m very passionate because I’m a guitar player – I went to GIT as I was beginning to work here. Just understanding the industry in general and how females are treated, we knew there was room for improvement.”

One of the first things they realized needed an update was the store’s marketing effort. “We became aware that when you went into a Guitar Center back then, all you would see would be pictures of Slash or pictures of other heavy metal artists on our windows and in our buyer’s guides. All of our marketing materials. It was all very ‘tractor pull’ types of marketing tactics.”

“So we changed a lot of that. We started focusing females in our buyer’s guides, female photos on the outside of our stores, and looked at our entire marketing package. We started doing things like female-centric types of clinics and contests.” To help make the company’s long-running “King of the Blues” contest more accepting, they renamed it “Battle of the Blues.” After the rename, female entries increased. “We had around 14,000 entries, and 30 percent of those were female.”

Beacock says that, at an even more elemental shop design level, women in decision-making roles can make for very important aesthetic changes in retail design. “Women just don’t want to hang out in a dirty, junky store,” she says. “It has to be a warm, comfortable environment for women to want to bring the children in for lessons. Especially today, parents want a real ‘safe zone’ feel. They want to know that the restrooms are clean. Women just love interesting displays and really respond well to better signage and, in turn, buy more.”

Beacock, whose mother, Susan, first lent her careful eye to the store’s merchandise when she helped found the store 1976, says that they’ve always strived for great atmosphere. “We have kicked it up a notch,” she says. “Not just making the shop environmentally comfortable but looking at the displays and matching them up with women and buying some products geared toward women. Once we did that, our female customer base really changed. Not only did they come in with their husbands or boyfriends or whatever, but they’d actually try things out and it took that intimidation level down so we could broaden our customer base.”

She says items like Daisy Rock guitars help on a few levels because they provide entry points for lessons programs, live opportunities, and more. “People can walk right up to those products because they’re captivated by those sparkly guitars, and then you can start talking to them about the classes or whatever you have to offer them.”

And sometimes it’s just the simple things that make a difference. At Candyman, Cook says that it was her mission to change the shop’s reputation as a pros-only shop to a place for everyone. “We wanted to create a vibe and openness to promote a community standing that anyone could come in our store and feel safe and comfortable.” She brightened the space, became strict about vulgar language in the shop and on bulletin boards, and began holding family events (while maintaining relationships with their loyal pro customers).  They also provide a lounge for moms to relax in during their kids’ music lessons and added a gift shop that’s a proven hit.

Staff Adjustments

A pervasive stereotype of the guitar store experience, in particular, is that it’s an adolescent boy’s playground, where attitudes can be stuck in junior high levels of maturity. Hilken Mancini, who founded the Boston Girls Rock Campaign, puts it bluntly.

“I think that the way men in guitar and music stores generally act towards women is still, sadly, very typically sexist and demeaning,” she says. “The world of rock’n’roll loves to treat women as either groupies or muses and it makes me wanna puke. Things have changed when women are writing most of the hits and bigger selling hit songs in our industry and why they don’t really know or acknowledge this is beyond me.”

Needless to say, one of the most important lines on the retailers’ battlefield is its own staff. Just as manufacturers strive to include more female options in their products and to create more inclusive marketing, so too can retailers work to level their own playing field.

Laura Taylor says that she learned a lot when Guitar Center first looked into how their staff and customers interacted: “We reached out to around 1,500 female customers just to get their feedback. It was definitely eye-opening. It’s not just Guitar Center, but the MI industry in general. They go into a store and feel like they’re treated as if they know nothing about music. If they walk in with a guy, the guy gets all the questions.

“So we put a heavy focus on training our sales staff to never assume that anyone is or is not a musician. You treat everyone the same. Everyone needs to understand that – music has no gender. That’s always something we need to be educating our store associates on as we grow.”

Taylor says another difficult issue was making sure that Guitar Center’s female employees, themselves, were being treated right. “At the time of the study, we found that our female associates are only seven percent of our overall store population. How do we grow that?”

Numbers have been increasing year over year for GC’s female associates, but it has been a challenge. When the current initiative began, female associates stayed with the company a year less the males, on average. “An enlightening part of our studies was the way our customers treated our female associates. We had gone on a big campaign to make sure our employees were treating each other with respect, but this was actually a whole different issue. Dealing with customers. When our associates are on the sales floor and have to deal with things like customers telling them, ‘You don’t know what I’m talking about – I want to talk to a guy,’  all the way down to getting poked with drum sticks. It wouldn’t take long for them to say, ‘This isn’t worth it.’

Winning the PR Battle

When the She Rocks Awards debuted at the NAMM Show in 2013, it marked a new effort to recognize women in all aspects of the music industry. Headed by longtime advocate Laura B. Whitmore, the awards were an extension of her Women’s International Music Network (WiMN). “I’m just trying to help expose role models to other girls and women so they can realize, ‘I can do that,’” says Whitmore.

This effort, just like the fight for increased support for music education, is vital for the industry both in terms of supporting its young women and accomplished stars, but also in ensuring that every future customer feels confident in their equal footing in MI.  “I especially think for teenagers or women in college who are trying to figure out what they want to do, they don’t really see those role models. So like myself, the MI industry is not on their radar as something they might do.”

The WiMN website features weekly interviews with a woman in the industry (there are over 100 published already, from all walks of the trade). Recent features included engineer Kim Watson, NAMM operations director Cindy Sample, Seymour Duncan art director Andreina Diaz, and West Music’s Robin Walenta.

The name of the game is advocacy and, for the most part, the industry is taking a very proactive role. “I think the MI Industry as a whole has done a remarkable job in music advocacy,” says Cook.  “These efforts have created new music makers in both genders and all ages, but the increase in women customers can partly be contributed to the awareness and the connections gleaned from these efforts.”

Through efforts like brick-and-mortar lesson programs as well as sponsorship of initiatives like Little Kids Rock, Girls Rock camps, and more, retailers are helping to pick up the slack in places where school music doesn’t have the budget or expertise to help.

The Boston Girls Rock contingent, like its sister programs throughout the country, is seeking to simply make girls comfortable with the tools of the trade. “We are making every effort to dismantle the traditional mystique most men like to put upon gear and instrument maintenance so that girls and women feel as though it is a simple and easy job done,” says Mancini. “It is not impossible to understand or within our grasp to change tubes, clean knobs, eyeball the neck of a guitar, lower and raise your pick-up in your guitar – this is not brain surgery.”

Beacock says the support of out-of-school programs is supremely important. “We have to provide most of those opportunities because there really aren’t a lot of them out there,” says Beacock. “I think NAMM has spearheaded that more than anything. We, in turn, pass that on to our customers and there becomes more women customers and women players and it’s just a good thing for everybody.”

Ciravolo agrees that non-traditional music education programs have been a huge help. “In the past decade, there has been an awesome movement to host girls’ rock camps that teach young women musicianship while building their self-esteem and confidence at a time when it is needed in spades,” she says. “At Daisy Rock Girl Guitars, we are very serious about our mission to get guitars into the hands of every girl that wants to play, so each year we donate dozens of instruments to these camps. With these programs, we are seeing the MI landscape change before our eyes, while also empowering girls to be successful in other areas of their lives.”