The Female Music Producer and the Leveraging of Difference

Abstract

Our research into women and music production has led us to the London studio of a full-time female music producer who has agreed to share her story with us. It sits in a building that houses a cluster of recording studios on a small industrial estate and as we wait for the security door to open, we discuss whether such austere metal-and-concrete surroundings might have a phenomenological impact upon a woman’s experience of working as a music producer. We resist seeing the space as masculine simply because of its industrial appearance; we resist until our interviewee tells us there are no female toilets in the building and most of them are labelled male. We laugh about the obvious semiotics. (“So, where do they put the tampon machine?” we ask). Testing whether “music producer” and the studio space are imaginatively male is one of the aims of our inquiry and the clue seems to be (rather prosaically) embedded within the material world of these purpose-built recording studios where signs of maleness are literally nailed to the doors.