Fix The Mix Launches To Elevate Women & Equalize The Recording Industry

We Are Moving the Needle and other advocacy groups partner with Jaxsta to surface more women and non-binary recording industry creators in its credits database.

Led by We Are Moving the Needle and Jaxsta, a coalition of leading music industry organizations has launched FIX THE MIX, an initiative that seeks to streamline the process of finding and connecting with recording industry professionals who identify as she/her and they/them. Jaxsta will be the first music industry credits database of its kind with gender identifiers, through which the industry will be able to search and connect with engineers, producers, mixers, and songwriters who are women or non-binary. FIX THE MIX is hopeful that this resource will lead to increased work opportunities for these groups. Other organizations that have already signed on to work with FIX THE MIX include Women in Music, SoundGirls, shesaid.so, Change the Conversation, Gender Amplified, and Femme House with more expected to join.

To enable this connection, Jaxsta, the platform powering FIX THE MIX, pledges to prioritize the inclusion of gender pronoun identifiers as well as foster opportunities aimed at creating parity. Jaxsta is the world’s only official music credits database, home to more than 220 million credits by 13 million creatives: producers, songwriters, engineers, artists, and musicians. Those creators who identify as women or non-binary are encouraged to claim their Jaxsta profiles and add their pronouns. All recording professionals who are credited on released music automatically have a Jaxsta profile compiled from metadata that is sourced from Jaxsta’s official Data Partners (Record Labels, Distributors, Publishers, The Recording Academy, RIAA and more).

Grammy Award-winning mastering engineer Emily Lazar founded We Are Moving the Needle to help close the vast gender gap highlighted by last year’s report from The Annenberg Inclusion Initiative. That study found that only about 2% of record producers and engineers are women. In her quest to make it easier for people to find, inspire and hire women in these fields, Lazar approached Jaxsta, the source she frequently uses to check album credits, about creating a way to search for and highlight women in its database. FIX THE MIX grew out of those conversations. Around the same time, Jaxsta was compiling its soon-to-be-published Jaxsta Honors List, which celebrates the achievements of top producers and engineers by analyzing the data it has received from its various partners over the past 12 months. The results of that analysis are in line with the dismal statistics revealed by The Annenberg Inclusion Initiative Report: the Jaxsta Honors List of Top Producers has only 3 women in the top 100, confirming the need to FIX THE MIX.

“While we still have a long way to go, I am thrilled to see this important step toward parity in the hiring process for women in the technical fields of the recording industry,” says Lazar. “The music business desperately needs a resource that can highlight, enable, and source women and non-binary engineers, producers, creators, and songwriters, side by side with their male counterparts.”

Jaxsta Founder and CEO Jacqui Louez Schoorl shares: “From the day that Jaxsta was founded my mission has been to celebrate diversity and drive opportunities for all. I truly believe that you can’t be what you can’t see, which is why I feel so strongly about redressing the gender balance in the recording industry, so that future generations of female and gender minority recording talent can see a pathway to the opportunities they so richly deserve.”

As part of FIX THE MIX, Jaxsta will also feature women and non-binary recording professionals on its Explore page, which is visited by more than 150,000 music industry and music fans every month.

More info at Jaxsta.com

About Jaxsta
Jaxsta is the world’s largest public-facing and most connected music credits database and technology. Partnered with the industry’s leading major and independent record companies, as well as publishers, distributors, royalty agencies and industry associations, Jaxsta is the go-to authoritative source of official music credits information, as opposed to crowd sourced information. The Company’s core platform, Jaxsta.com, is a free and paid subscription service and provides B2B data-solutions for the music and related media industries. Jaxsta Pro, the Company’s subscription service, harnesses the power of Jaxsta’s data to help music industry professionals connect, save time, and advance their businesses and careers.

About We Are Moving The Needle
We Are Moving The Needle is a nonprofit organization supporting all women and non-binary recording industry professionals, audio engineers and producers. They are an inclusive organization working to create measurable change by empowering women and non-binary individuals in the recording and professional audio industry with the education, equipment, mentorship and opportunity needed to succeed at the highest levels.