Tag: dif ev

When artists carry the unfair burden of bad organisation

Feel free to send your testimonials or request for advice at info @ dif- ev.org or via our contact form.
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Promoters should want their guests to have the best musical experience possible, hence should treat artists’ technical and logistics needs as a priority – as long as demands remain reasonable.
However, a lot of promoters consider they have “bought” the talent, so artists should smile and perform like circus dogs, jumping through every flaming hoop, because it will be primarily their career that gets damaged if the show goes wrong or if they leave because they could not take the abuse.

How do we expect marginalised artists to deliver professional stage performances when getting through soundcheck is already an exhausting battle, and how could promoters not support the artists they booked delivering the best show possible?

As we saw with Grimes’ Coachella fiasco DJ set in 2024, folks were quick to attack a woman’s career until her technician came clean online. Despite his explaining how his rushed tech preps lead to a performance failure, people fell for the clickbait articles and looked the other way when the real story was revealed.

Both promoters and technical teams are protected by their anonymity, and while they benefit from artists’ fame and stage work, once an artist or their team raise an organisational issue, they are quick to shift the blame on the talent being “difficult” or “disorganised”, gaslight performers into thinking they are the problem – and this of course can escalate a lot depending on how marginalised the artist is.

51% women have faced gender-based discrimination in the music industry. We think of lack of opportunity, pay gap, ageism/racism/family status double standards, sexual harassment… but maybe the most common act of casual sexism is technicians patronising women and gender-diverse musicians, schooling them on their own sound, refusing to provide professional service, becoming dismissive or agressive if the musicians keep on asking for their technical needs to be met.

• Promoters and event organisers need to vet their team and be responsible for all aspects of their events, including techs.
• Artists and agents must make it clear on booking contracts that the tech rider is a sine qua non condition to perform.
• Technical teams who are already doing the work, need to make it known, and grow awareness on good practices.
• Technical teams who still believe they can project their own shortcomings on marginalised artists, need to re-train or retire.

A history of dif

Here is the little story of how the dif Verein (to be translated as member’s club or NGO) or in its full version “diverse, inclusive, and fair”, and the accompanying website came to be. The common expression is DEI, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, in real life equity tends to be the last piece of the puzzle, my guess is the letters were exchanged to avoid the less funky acronym DIE.

With dif, we put these values in the order we believe they happen in real-life situations: diversity is the tip of the iceberg, it is visible and many brands want to use it as a marketing tool – this what we call diversity-washing. Inclusion is the next step, not only teams, lineups, boards, etc. are diverse, but each individual is included in decision-making, team work, content, etc. The last one, equity or in our case we use the simpler adjective fair – this is a word that children learn at a small age and that shapes our vision of the world, is harder to pin down as it is less visible. Equity is of course about sharing resources or paying people in a fair way, it also touches to the notion of social differences and sustainability: fairness is not the same as equality, in order for each person to reach the same goal, they may need different or ampler resources. It is also possible that sometimes, someone must give up a piece of privilege so someone else can break through the glass ceiling.

So how is this fair you ask? Because society is about the well-being of each individual, but also about common well-being; how can someone feel happy when their neighbour is suffering. By giving up a piece of privilege, we encourage sustainability in society, which in the long term benefits us all. A common example in the music industry is when companies or festivals spend more time and money to recruit, train, and include diverse workers or diverse acts, and when in the long term they get a bigger audience, turn higher profits, and offer a more interesting experience to all parties involved.

And now, why small letters for dif? We have nothing against grammar, but small letters are cute and less shouty. All letters being small, in opposition to only the first one being capitalized, is a graphic way of saying we believe everybody is at the same level: clout, financial means, or millions of social media followers do not make a person more important than another, the positive actions that a person does for the world at their own level are what make them shine.
Oh and the dif letters in the logo are read from bottom to top, because the People will rise.

Finally, why these colours, and why do they change each time you refresh the page? We picked soft colours, because the subject of DEI is already hot enough without adding flashy colours to it. The colours change because we did not want to settle on just a colour for this or that… we love change and visual diversity – which is also why we decided not to overly format our biographies, so you can hear each of our voices, us the six founding members of dif, a bunch of old and new friends and colleagues all connected by the music industry. The web studio that supported our vision found a fun way to mix human decision with technological randomisation – for those who appreciate tech stuff: they used a colour generator, input pastel colours, and applied a coded filter that allows colour shifts entirely with CSS.

We aimed for the website to be easy to navigate and for the layout not to be overwhelming. We hope you will find our content a useful resource to promote DEI in the music industry, and you can reach us at info @ dif-ev . org or via the contact form.