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Women Are Still Underrepresented in Entertainment. These LA Startups Want to Change That.
Shira Yevin’s lifelong crusade against a male-dominated music industry began with a pink RV.
After attending the Vans Warped Tour in 2004 and seeing far too few women on the bill, the punk rocker decided to take matters into her own hands: She crashed the tour by parking a pink RV on the campus of Cal State Fullerton and performing on a makeshift stage with her band, Shiragirl. The impromptu show was such a hit that Warped Tour welcomed Yevin back to run an official “Shiragirl Stage,” where female-fronted bands—including artists like Joan Jett and Paramore—performed in the following years.
Now, Yevin is taking an entrepreneurial approach to carve out more space for women in music. She’s the founder and CEO of Los Angeles-based startup Gritty In Pink, which runs an online “marketplace network” that connects music industry professionals with female talent—from musicians and songwriters to engineers and producers. Having launched in beta earlier this year, the startup’s InPink platform lets employers search for talent by skill and demographic.
“Businesses now know they need to find diverse women to hire—but they have no idea where to go to find them,” Yevin told dot.LA.
Whether Gritty In Pink can help solve that imbalance remains to be seen—but what’s clear is that there’s still a huge gender disparity in the music industry that needs addressing. A recent University of Southern California-sponsored study found that there’s been little to no improvement over the last decade in the number of women credited as artists, songwriters or producers on popular songs.
“Women's contributions are often dismissed or devalued,” according to Katherine Pieper, program director at USC’s Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, which conducted the study on women in music. “They're not given the opportunity to work on these songs, or when they are, their work is not being credited to them.”
The USC study examined credits for 1,000 songs that landed on the year-end Billboard Hot 100 chart over the last decade. Researchers found that just 23.3% of artists on the annual chart were women in 2021—a marginal improvement from 22.7% in 2012. The report’s authors blamed stereotypes around women and their abilities as well as the situations in which they must work, noting women in the music industry are often sexualized by their colleagues.
The music industry is not alone in these dynamics; the film industry has made little progress in addressing its own gender imbalance. Women made up only 25% of all directors, writers, producers, executive producers, editors and cinematographers working on top-grossing films in 2021, according to the latest study by the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film at San Diego State University. That’s an improvement of just 6 percentage points from 19% in 2015, and up only 8 percentage points from 17% in 1998.
“The findings of my research suggest that progress will be slow—evolutionary as opposed to revolutionary,” Martha Lauzen, the center’s director, told dot.LA.
But just as Gritty In Pink is trying to diversify the music industry’s ranks, so are there startups now looking to bring more women into film production. Launched in 2018, L.A.-based Crewvie is a platform connecting film projects with production workers and vendors, with a focus on advancing diversity, equity and inclusion. Crewvie allows talent to create profiles that voluntarily self-identify their gender, race, sexual orientation or disabilities; productions can use Crewvie to hire such talent, track the composition of their crew and use demographic data to ensure they’re eligible for awards and tax incentives.
“We see Crewvie as a resource for women and other underserved people to be found,” co-founder and CEO Marcei Brown told dot.LA. “So there's no more excuses [like] ‘I can't find’—because they're all collected here in one place.”
From left, Crewvie founders Sandra Jimenez, Jeanette Volturno, Marcei Brown and Camille Alcasid.Photo provided by Crewvie
Film studio Endeavor Content recently struck a deal with Crewvie to deploy the startup’s software across all of its productions. YouTube productions use the platform as well, according to co-founder Jeanette Volturno. Crewvie charges rates ranging from $200 to $1,500 for individual projects, while rates for enterprise clients (such as film studios) depend on the number of people and projects expected to use it.
With less than 10 employees, Crewvie is currently looking to close a seed funding round, with eyes on a larger future funding round to expand the platform into other territories and languages. Crewvie is also considering an expansion into live events like theater productions, as well as a foray into the music industry, Volturno said.
Likewise, Gritty In Pink is still in its “baby stages,” Yevin said, having raised $100,000 from Irvine-based Sunstone Management and the Long Beach Accelerator, with plans for a $1 million pre-seed round. The startup can count singer-songwriter Melissa Etheridge, of “Come to My Window” fame, among its supporters; Etheridge recently joined Gritty In Pink as a strategic advisor and has a stake in the company.
It also has dreams of expanding beyond the music industry, Yevin noted. “Our big vision is actually to become the global destination to hire female freelancers in every industry,” she said.
Web3 startup Afterparty has raised $4 million to launch an NFT-based ticketing platform for live events, with plans to use its Utopian NFTs as event tickets after a trial run at a Las Vegas music festival last month.
Afterparty landed the new capital—which it described as an extension of its $3 millions seed round from last fall—from more than two dozen investors, including angel investors like Paris Hilton and Jason Calacanis and VC firms like early-stage crypto fund Blockchange. Existing investors Acrew Capital and TenOneTen Ventures also participated. (Disclosure: dot.LA co-founder and chairman Spencer Rascoff is an investor in Afterparty and contributed to the round.)
Afterparty has now raised $7 million in total funding since launching in August 2021, co-founder and CEO David Fields told dot.LA. Fields, a former executive at Michael Eisner’s investment firm The Tornante Company, said Afterparty is “building technology to enable creators and music artists to build direct connections with their fans and realize the full potential of Web3.”
The startup trialed its NFT ticketing technology in Las Vegas last month, at what it called the “first NFT-gated festival ever”—meaning nobody could get in unless they owned one of Afterparty’s Utopian NFTs or were a guest of an NFT holder. Fields said over 6,000 people attended the event.
The Utopian NFT collection features 1,500 pieces of art depicting headshots of futuristic, cyberpunk-esque robots. On NFT exchange OpenSea, the NFTs are listed at prices ranging from 5.35 ETH (roughly $16,400) to 50 ETH (upwards of $153,000).
Owning one of these NFTs—some of which the company minted earlier this year at a party at its Afterparty House in the Hollywood Hills—comes with perks, including access to future Afterparty festivals. Afterparty is now planning a Los Angeles festival for this coming October—with access coming through its upcoming Guardian NFT collection, which will provide holders with “lifetime festival membership,” it said.
Afterparty’s venture into event ticketing is an attempt to disrupt services like Ticketmaster, which often charge hefty transaction fees. Local startups like Granted, which raised a $3 million seed round this February, are also looking to use cryptocurrency and NFTs to wrest power away from ticketing brokers.
Fields noted that blockchain technology also makes it impossible to scalp an NFT ticket. He added that Afterparty is involved in discussions with other festivals interested in integrating its NFT ticketing system, but wouldn’t disclose specifics.
“The ability to buy a ticket every subsequent year… if you had that in the first year of Coachella or the first year of Burning Man, that would be something that'd be really valuable,” Fields said.
Afterparty also plans to allow music artists to mint their own NFTs through the company and use those as tickets for their own events and festivals.
“Collectively, [artists] get 0% of secondary sales today,” Fields said. “$10 billion-plus of global secondary sales in concerts are going to other parties, and I believe NFTs are going to be a really big part of the story about how artists and venues can recapture a lot more of the value in that market.”
Stem, a music tech startup focused on helping artists with distribution and payments, has raised $20 million in a new funding round.
Fintech-focused venture capital firm QED Investors led the funding and was joined by Block, the Jack Dorsey-led payments tech company formerly known as Square. Block notably paid nearly $300 million last year to acquire a majority stake in TIDAL, the music streaming service backed by rapper Jay-Z.
Existing investors Slow Ventures and Quality Control also pitched in on Stem’s new round, which takes the Los Angeles-based startup’s total funding to around $40 million.
Since launching in 2015, Stem has merged financial management tools with music distribution capabilities, working with independent record labels like Big Loud as well as major artists like Wiz Khalifa. Its dashboard includes tools for artists, managers and labels to oversee their revenues, split funds with collaborators and receive automated payments. While only Stem-distributed artists can currently access its financial tools, the new funds will go toward expanding the platform’s existing royalty accounting features to other music distributors.
Stem co-founder and CEO Milana Lewis told dot.LA that she launched the startup based on her experiences as a talent agent for industry heavyweight United Talent Agency—a role in which she saw firsthand how difficult it was for artists trying to aggregate multiple revenue streams. Stem was born out of Lewis’ desire to streamline the process.
“Getting into music has always been hard for anyone that works in music,” Lewis said. “There’s this notion of a starving artist for a reason: It’s because the business is really complex, and it’s gotten more complex.”
With avenues for music monetization—from streaming platforms to home devices—constantly expanding, Stem aims to provide artists with a “financial backbone” allowing them to plan their projects and income, Lewis added.
“Our belief is: What if we build a system that can become the system of record for who gets paid what and how?” she said. “It makes it possible for other really interesting economic things to happen for artists.”
Stem is among a new generation of startups that are turning L.A. into a music tech hotbed—a trend that makes sense given the city's status as a global entertainment capital and home to major labels like Universal Music Group. Last week saw Trac, another startup distribution platform for music artists, raise $2.5 million in new funding, as dot.LA reported.
While streaming has helped the music business evolve its revenue model, that hasn't always been to the benefit of artists: Spotify recently revealed that most artists earned less than $10,000 through its platform in 2021. In turn, some independent musicians have protested against the streaming giant over its low royalty payments.
- Trac Raises $2.5 Million To Help Artists Monetize Music - dot.LA ›
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- LA's Music-Tech Startups Are Poised to Reshape the Industry. - dot.LA ›