“The ECMA’s were supposed to be in May and they were canceled because of the pandemic and they sort of did this show instead in the middle of July, which is really why I think this is getting traction, because I’ve been yelling about gender disparity at the ECMA’s my whole career as a journalist for like 20 years. It almost always happens but people are really picking up on it now because they did the show on the weekend and with the actual performances on the show you can tell they went out of their way to include more women and to be more diverse. There was still the man with the guitars and the banjos and whatnot but Neon Dreams was on there, Rose Cousins, and [then] of course it ended with Wintersleep, the five men. But to me that shows an awareness that they knew how bad it looked and yet they still went with the winners anyway, when this is the year that they could have done nothing and awarded nobody and then reframed and regrouped for next year and no one would have held it against them for there to be no ECMA’s in 2020.”
Despite many non-men being nominated for East Coast Music Award’s this year, only 4 out of 27 total awards given out were given to women or bands with women in them. CHMA reached out to journalist Tara Thorne as to her thoughts on this years awards presentation (listen to the full interview above) and how she thinks we can diversify the ECMA’s moving forward.
“It starts at the top and it starts at the bottom. Basically the people that have been running the music industry, at least in Nova Scotia I can’t really speak to New Brunswick or Newfoundland or PEI but I imagine it’s very similar; the people that have been running the music industry in Nova Scotia have always run it as long as I’ve been covering it, so we’re talking 20-30 years, so of course they’re looking out for number one and whatever they want is what goes, so that’s part of the problem. . . You’re not going to convince somebody that had a job in the record industry for 30 years to just go ‘okay here I’ll just hand it to this young person’ they’re not going to do it, but what they could do is actively look for those [young] people and try to develop those young cool artists and give them the legs that that their artists have had for decades. We could start there, and they also need to make joining the ECMA [East Coast Music Association] and all of the provincial music industry associations appealing to artists. I’m finding I’m seeing young artists, diverse artists, queer artists are just like that’s not cool, I’m not gonna do it, why would I pay these people however much money a year to help me with nothing. So, they’ve really got to do a push to diversify the membership and the people at the top have to jump into this century and take a look around at what they’re doing and how they can make it better. “
It is extremely important to push to diversify the East Coast Music Association and to uplift the voices of underrepresented, young artists, but Tara’s final piece of advice to up and coming musicians was:
“My whole thing with the music industry is you don’t pay attention to it, make your saying ‘cream rises to the top’. . . be true to yourself and don’t pay attention to what the industry does because the industry will notice you after the fact if you do it yourself, and then you don’t need them to do anything. That would be my advice.”
