HARD Events Co-Founder Promises All-Female EDM Show In 2014

November 7th, 2013

Kyle Florence

Earlier this morning during an interview with WildSpice Magazine, the co-founder of HARD Events, Gary Richards, revealed his plans for an all-female electronic music festival, tentatively scheduled to take place at some point in 2014.

The news comes after a recent slew of media criticism arguing that the music industry is too male-oriented. Months ago, Buzzfeed publicly pondered “Where are all the women at Coachella?”, after viewing the event’s lineup and noting that female-led groups made up only 16% of all the performers. Similarly, an article published in Slate shortly thereafter described gender inequality within the music field as an “epidemic,” and urged festival organizers to “expand beyond their narrow roots” and “start to take the commercially and critically successful female acts they currently deride more seriously.”

Richards agreed, and was quick to acknowledge that out of all the acts that performed via his organization over the last five years, only 8% were women. Still, he admitted he is unsure why such events are continually “more male-driven.”

“Hopefully it changes. I would love to have 60 female DJ’s that are all awesome. To me, I always think everything’s better with girls. There’s a ton of cool female artists, I wish there were more,” Richards said.

Richards also elaborated that the event would likely take place at Los Angeles’ Palladium, but made clear that he’s “not worried about selling the tickets” at this point, but rather “just getting them [the artists] all at the same time.”

“I have a concept for a show that’s all girl performers,” Richards said. “It’s not a 70,000 person event, but I do see more females coming up, and I’m definitely gonna do it in 2014.”

As always, UTG will keep you up to date as this story continues to develop.