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"Dangerous men" at the top of the industry are abusing their power, the BBC has been told.

Singer paused the show after witnessing the incident from the stage

Sweden's biggest music festival will be replaced next year by a women-only alternative after reports of a series of rapes and sexual assaults at this year's event.

This paper addresses how feminist interrogations of research methods and knowledge claims have an important role to play in the collection and dispersion of quantitative data. Taking the contemporary film industry as a historical formation, and seeking to identify and understand patterns of continued gendered inequality, we consider the methodological and ethical dilemmas we have experienced as feminist researchers gathering and presenting quantitative data on the numbers of women working in the UK film industry between 2003 and 2015. We argue that data plays a paradoxical role in creating a sense of women’s absence and arrive at a set of guiding principles for feminist quantitative research in film histories.

Background Australian and international street-level drug law enforcement deploy many strategies in efforts to prevent or deter illicit drug offending. Limited evidence of deterrence exists. This study assessed the likely impacts of four Australian policing strategies on the incidence and nature of drug use and supply at a common policing target: outdoor music festivals. Methods A purpose-built national online survey (the Drug Policing Survey) was constructed using five hypothetical experimental vignettes that took into account four policing strategies (High Visibility Policing, Riot Policing, Collaborative Policing, and policing with Drug Detection Dogs) and a counter-factual (no police presence). The survey was administered in late 2015 to 2115 people who regularly attend festivals. Participants were block-randomised to receive two vignettes and asked under each whether they would use, possess, purchase, give or sell illicit drugs. Results Compared to ‘no police presence’, any police presence led to a 4.6% point reduction in engagement in overall illicit drug offending: reducing in particular willingness to possess or carry drugs into a festival. However, it had minimal or counterproductive impacts on purchasing and supply. For example, given police presence, purchasing of drugs increased significantly within festival grounds. Offending impacts varied between the four policing strategies: Drug Detection Dogs most reduced drug possession but High Visibility Policing most reduced overall drug offending including supply. Multivariate logistic regression showed police presence was not the most significant predictor of offending decisions at festivals. ConclusionConclusion The findings suggest that street-level policing may deter some forms of drug offending at music festivals, but that most impacts will be small. Moreover, it may encourage some perverse impacts such as drug consumers opting to buy drugs within festival grounds rather than carry in their own. We use our findings to highlight trade-offs between the goals of public health promotion and crime control in street-level enforcement.

This report demonstrates that male advantage is a pervasive feature of the Australian music industry. Using publicly available published data the report interrogates the industry dynamics that have produced a contemporary music scene in which radio playlists, festival line-ups, industry awards, peak bodies and major industry boards are dominated by male contributions and voices. We make 5 key recommendations, discussed in more detail in the report, to begin the process of addressing the industry’s chronic gender inequality: 1. Collect more and better data on the music industry on a gender disaggregated basis; 2. Establish a well-resourced independent gender equality industry advocacy body; 3. Use gender equality criteria in deciding public funding outcomes; 4. Increase women’s representation in decision-making structures; 5. Address gender bias in the Australian music industry by prioritising inclusivity and representation as core industry values (for example through funding and implementing training programs). The music industry is skipping a beat when it comes to gender equality. We hope that our report will stimulate industry thinking and action for change.

Gaining accurate information on illicit drug use and policing in real-world settings is a challenge. This study examines the utility of a smartphone app (‘Going Out In Sydney’) to prospectively follow up illicit drug use and policing encounters at music festivals and licensed entertainment precincts in Sydney, Australia. In all, 38 regular festival and licensed entertainment venue attendees used the app to log nights out over a 3-month period, including (1) where they went (eg, festival, nightclub), (2) the prevalence of illicit drug use, and (3) the incidence and nature of police encounters. A survey and interview were then conducted about the utility of the app. The app enabled rich data collection (n = 353 entries) about illicit drug use and policing at both target settings. Follow-up surveys indicated that most participants were extremely satisfied with the ease of use of the app and privacy afforded, and compared with other data collection modes, such as paper-based logs and online surveys, rated the app the most desirable method of data collection. This suggests smartphone apps may be a viable option for future studies on illicit drug use and policing of drugs.

Organisers say academy is more gender-balanced and diverse after last year’s failure to nominate black artists

The music industry is hugely homogenised. In the UK, all three heads of the major record labels are men, and there’s just three women…

Background Music festivals have received relatively little research attention despite being key sites for alcohol and drug use among young people internationally. Research into music festivals and the social contexts of drug use more generally, has tended to focus on social and cultural processes without sufficient regard for the mediating role of space and spatial processes. Methods Adopting a relational approach to space and the social, from Actor-Network Theory and human geography, I examine how socio-spatial relations are generated in campsites at multiple-day music festivals. The data are drawn from ethnographic observations at music festivals around Melbourne, Australia; interviews with 18–23 year olds; and participant-written diaries. Results Through the analysis, the campsite is revealed as a space in process, the making of which is bound up in how drug use unfolds. Campsite relations mediate the formation of drug knowledge and norms, informal harm reduction practices, access to and exchange of drugs, and rest and recovery following drug use. Conclusions Greater attendance to socio-spatial relations affords new insights regarding how festival spaces and their social effects are generated, and how they give rise to particular drug use practices. These findings also point to how festival harm reduction strategies might be enhanced through the promotion of enabling socio-spatial relations.

This article contributes to debates about the value and utility of the notion of postfeminism for a seemingly “new” moment marked by a resurgence of interest in feminism in the media and among young women. The paper reviews current understandings of postfeminism and criticisms of the term’s failure to speak to or connect with contemporary feminism. It offers a defence of the continued importance of a critical notion of postfeminism, used as an analytical category to capture a distinctive contradictory-but-patterned sensibility intimately connected to neoliberalism. The paper raises questions about the meaning of the apparent new visibility of feminism and highlights the multiplicity of different feminisms currently circulating in mainstream media culture – which exist in tension with each other. I argue for the importance of being able to “think together” the rise of popular feminism alongside and in tandem with intensified misogyny. I further show how a postfeminist sensibility informs even those media productions that ostensibly celebrate the new feminism. Ultimately, the paper argues that claims that we have moved “beyond” postfeminism are (sadly) premature, and the notion still has much to offer feminist cultural critics.

Kieron Faller from CI reveals best-practice for diverse businesses…

Sweden is often considered one of the most gender-equal countries in the world and held up as a model to follow, but the reality is more complex. This is the first book to explode the myth of Swedish gender equality, both offering a new perspective for an international audience, and suggesting how equality might be rethought more generally. While the authors argue that the gender-equality mantra in Sweden has led to a society with increased opportunities for some, they also assert that the dominant norm of gender equality has become nationalistic and builds upon heteronormative and racial principles. Examining the changing meanings and parameters of gender equality against the country's social-democratic tradition and in the light of contemporary neoliberal ideologies, the book constitutes an urgent contribution to the debates about gender-equality policies and politics.

The 2016 Billboard Power 100 is dominated by white men born before Elvis had a hit. This isn’t only a problem of representation – it’s also bad for the industry

Hill offers a much needed discussion of the lack of consideration given to gender in academic discussions of hard rock and metal music and the media. Drawing on her own experience as a musician and fan, the author argues that orthodoxies—e.g., the genre is inclusive, the music asexual and sexism non-existent—are only able to persist within the literature because scholars have neglected to understand how musical experiences are gendered. Within the context of feminist popular music scholarship, work on fandom and feminist methodological work, Hill outlines the need to study hard rock, metal and the media with close attention to the influence of gender.

Hill examines the differing theoretical frameworks, e.g., subculture and scene, used to examine hard rock and metal fans, arguing that these have worked to the detriment of understanding the gendered experience of music, including taking pleasure in the music. She proposes a new way of thinking about fandom that incorporates fans’ feelings of community. Drawing on Anderson’s (Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Verso, 1991) theory of the nation, and feminist writings on community (Weiss and Friedman, Feminism and Community. Temple University Press, 1995), she argues that ‘imaginary community’ better reflects fans’ sense of community, whilst allowing deep consideration of the ideology of the community with particular reference to values, beliefs, traditions and myths. She argues that these are deployed to create a sense of cohesion in spite of inequalities and unacknowledged privileges.

This chapter challenges readings of hard rock and metal as masculine music. Hill examines women’s accounts of their experiences of musical pleasure. Through analysis of women fans’ descriptions of their favourite bands, she argues that, pace Kahn-Harris (2007), fans can be very articulate about what they like. Work of feminist writers on rock music is enlisted to argue that considering women’s listening pleasure gives new insights into the meaning of hard rock and metal music. The assumption that hard rock and metal is a masculine genre neglects important aspects of women’s fandom which diverge from the dominant myths.

Chapter 6 considers the allegations that hard rock and metal is sexist. Talking to British women fans reveals that in their experiences, hard rock and metal is less sexist than the ‘mainstream’. Using research on sexism across a range of fields, Hill argues that understanding what counts as sexism is complex and requires critical work by fans when sexism is normalised. Listening to what fans say about the context of their experiences within their broader lives is vital for better understanding. The author argues that the genre provides moments in which women fans may gain a feeling of genderlessness. Ultimately, however, the feeling of liberation only comes through assimilation into the culture, a culture that ignores women as much as possible. Nevertheless, that temporary feeling is a valuable one.

The final chapter argues that close examination of the specific experiences of women in their engagements with the hard rock and metal media, the music, and musical events reveals how the experience of music is shaped by sexist assumptions about women and about how music should be listened to. Musical pleasure does not exist on a universal, transcendental plane. It is informed and shaped by the socio-cultural circumstances of the listener. Hill maintains that it is vital to acknowledge how these circumstances make for differing experiences: it is an important first step for countering sexism. The chapter concludes with a short plan for how hard rock and metal may imagine a genderless future, and how this imagined community might work towards it.

This chapter investigates how Kerrang! magazine, a key part of the metal media, creates an imaginary community of hard rock and metal fans. Using semiotic analysis, the author extrapolates four myths that are forged in the letters pages: two that are presented by the magazine as being common sense values of the community (equality and authenticity) and two that are less obvious, the groupie and the warrior, which determine how women and men are portrayed. These myths work together to depict the imaginary community as ideologically invested in maintaining the masculinity of the genre at the expense of femininity. Hill argues that dominant representations of women in the imaginary community render them as adjuncts to the real members of the community—the men—and this has damaging consequences.