B:Music (TDN 2025)
Organisation Biog: B:Music has a mission to inspire a love of music through performance, participation and learning. Our talent development work provides pathways for 2,500 young people to progress their musical education and to potentially develop careers as musicians or within the wider music industry, while our community projects support 5,000 local people who experience barriers to engaging with live music performances. Through our extensive and varied programme, we enrich Birmingham’s music sector by providing paid performance opportunities for local, national and international artists that are accessed by an annual combined audience of over 450,000 individuals.
Short Project Title: She:Music
Program Description: It’s long been recognised that women face significant obstacles to building creative potential and finding success in the music industry. This was confirmed in 2024 House of Commons, Women and Equalities Committee report Misogyny in Music, which stated that women in all roles face fewer opportunities, lack of support, gender discrimination and sexual harassment, as well as unequal pay due to self-employment and problematic gender power imbalances. She:Music will give female musicians skills, experiences and networks to challenge these difficulties and enhance their abilities and creative development.Working with Girl Grind UK and Women in Jazz, B:Music will encourage the foundations of a community of early career female musicians and the networks to empower this community. We will provide performance spaces to showcase talent, as well as opportunities to thrive through skills-based and sector-level workshops. Participants will be encouraged to work with peers from a range of backgrounds to facilitate cross-genre collaboration, particularly in Heavy Rock, Jazz and Sound Engineering, where female underrepresentation is most acute. This will lay the groundwork for creating and performing new music to audiences and, recording and promoting this new material, with participants being signposted to appropriate opportunities to support progression to becoming successful artists.