At last! More women in music festivals lineups as crowds become female dominated

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“Then we went to the shows and looked around and saw, it’s real. It wasn’t like a guy and a girl out together, it was six young women standing together for most of the day.”

At Laneway, female punters have outnumbered males by at least two per cent for the past four years, and by six per cent at this year’s festival. Currently, women form 51 per cent of festival attendees in the US and 60 per cent in the UK, according to market reports. This is not to assume that female audiences are only interested in seeing female artists, as Moffatt points out, but it does point to a significant shift in demographics from the blokey audiences that frequented Big Day Out, Soundwave, Stereosonic and other retired Australian festivals.And it follows that the more women there are on stage, the more women in the audience will feel empowered to follow in their footsteps.

“I do think this has a huge effect on women feeling like it is a space where they can give it a go”, says Warhurst. “You can be what you see. And the more women there are within the scene, hopefully that will lead to less behaviour that excludes them.”

As Kindellan points out, sometimes the conversation around gender inequality in music feels like a broken record. But festival lineups continue to be dominated by men, and that won’t change unless organisers continue to be held to account. At the end of 2017, booming Melbourne three-piece Camp Cope called out Falls Festival for the dearth of women on their lineup and their sub-par sexual assault policy in very public fashion – while on stage at Falls Festival in Byron Bay.

Camp Cope raise the same issues in The Opener, the blistering first track on their newly released sophomore album. “It’s another man telling us we can’t fill up the room, it’s another man telling us to book a smaller venue,” snarls singer Georgia McDonald.