‘Neither Pure Love nor Imitating Capitalism’: Euro WILD and the Invention of Women's Music Distribution in Europe, 1980–1982

Abstract

Euro Women's Independent Label Distribution (WILD) was a pan-European network of feminist music distributors active in the early 1980s. They were affiliated to WILD, the US-based Women's Music distribution network founded in 1979 to disseminate the growing corpus of Women's Music emerging from the US Women's Liberation Movement (WLM). This article presents an interpretation of archive materials that document Euro WILD's activities from the Women's Revolutions Per Minute archive, housed at the Women's Art Library, London. Constrained and enabled by the archive materials on offer, I revisit some of the practical and political problems the network faced as European distributors of US Women's Music. Key issues explored include the perception of US cultural imperialism by women based in Europe and the affective politics that circulated transnationally between distributors. Finally, this article explores how the concept and practice of the Women's Music industry changed when women beyond the borders of the US engaged with it.