Visibility

Someone did something clever with the festival posters this year. Splash, Hurricane, Rock am Ring—stripped out all the women’s names. What remained looked thin. You could see what wasn’t there.

The expected questions came up. Were women just not making festival music? Fewer of them starting out? Did audiences prefer men? Maybe random chance.

But I kept thinking about how visibility actually works. A musician I read—Laura Lee—broke it down. Women get on magazine covers maybe once every few months, if at all. Radio’s no different. Someone who programs for a major station was literally told that playing two female artists in a row was ’kind of exhausting.’ Two. Back-to-back. So women never break through the margins. The system keeps them there.

Looking back at those festival posters after that, they stopped looking like accident.