The shesaid.so community is celebrating 8 years of awareness, connection and education. Join us as we take a moment to reflect on what we achieved over the last 12 months and what the future may hold.
So far this year; we featured interviews with some of our favorite artists and music industry execs, showcased up and coming talent, embarked on several industry partnerships and projects, discussed issues that are at the core of our community and explored the latest trends in the music industry.
Our 2022 highlights:
We welcomed music executive Christine Osazuwa to the shesaid.so family in her new role as UK Director.
We launched the shesaidsoTV on Vans Channel 66, which featured a mix of interviews and DJ sets with some of the most inspiring women and gender non-conforming people in music, streaming live from Los Angeles, New York, Chicago and Mexico City.
We teamed up with DistroKid to bring you a 4-part series that unpacks the secrets behind a successful release.
We returned to International Music Summit with our own space across three days of programming focused on Innovation, Parenthood and the New Generation and a series of talks and conversations on the inclusive future of music and culture in Web3.
Our shesaid.so Parenthood Committee was regrouped with a set of actions to provide an open platform to empower parents, prospective parents and caregivers in the music industry.
We continued to elevate our community with new features and videos, including our permanent series; Artist Spotlight, Member Spotlight, Mix Series and the shesaid.so Radio LA & Spain at dublab and our Spotify Playlist.
We listened to our community and brought back our Google Group.
We were thrilled to host our showcase at Roundhouse Rising Festival and to take over ADE with the shesaid.so official space and we.grow Mentoring Program.
Stay tuned as we’ll share more about our achievements throughout the years!
For the rest of the year, we are taking some time to recalibrate and prepare for some exciting announcements in 2023. Take a moment to read an open letter from our founder Andreea Magdalina as she reflects on the past and hints at what the future may hold.
Dear community,
As we take a brief moment to celebrate our 8th anniversary, I feel compelled to deeply reflect on our past achievements and take our time contemplating the future.
We've learned and achieved so much over the last few years together with our members and partners. From countless events and online sessions, through to mentoring programs and editorial content that strived to educate and bring the community closer together. Since shesaid.so's launch as a passion project back in 2014, our community has seen and played a part in key moments for the music business and the diversity and inclusion movement - including a pandemic, #metoo, BLM, streaming, the rise (and lows) of the creator economy, web3 and NFTs to name a few. While some of the wider milestones in our society feel like setbacks, we cannot help but move towards the future with a deep sense of hope.
As we look towards the future in a sustainable way, it's imperative that we take a long term and deep thinking approach. Prior to the pandemic, our public-facing focus was on creating awareness of our mission & goals via events. The global shift to the digital space forced our community to find new ways of connecting and collaborating with one another and, in some cases, embrace new technologies that are once again reshaping how we produce, distribute and consume online outputs via blockchain. Not only that, but our community has evolved from a group of mostly female music executives to include people of all genders who work in music both in a creative and business capacity; we have grown larger in the US where our identity and our bodies are highly politicized; we have welcomed more artists than ever before and we have expanded in new territories while others have folded.
New questions around identity, community, economic value, inflation, digital governance, privacy and ownership have emerged, pushing the music & creative industries to reimagine their place in the world and on the internet. shesaid.so is no stranger to these questions. As a community, it feels we have arrived at a crossroads: on one hand, we have accomplished our mission to drive awareness of diversity and inclusion, and, on the other, it feels as if this newfound social awareness has created more polarization than ever before. If conversation & awareness were our goals thus far, where do we go from here? What is our place in the music business today and moving forward? Who are we and how do we capture this ever evolving communal agency that makes us, authentically us?
In order to find the most thoughtful answers to these questions, we are taking a step back from all major projects for the remainder of the year to make room for deep investigation. This means our annual Alternative Power 100 Music List campaign is indefinitely going on hold, along with our monthly editions of Artist & Member Spotlights, Community Town Halls and other recurring editorials. We are also going to evaluate our existing partnerships, allies and core members to ensure they continue to be in alignment with our values as we look towards the future with a renewed sense of standards. To improve transparency, we will rearticulate shesaid.so's vision, mission statement and values and reassemble them into a new cohesive documentation system that our community can easily reference internally and externally. Last but not least, we will explore new tools of organization and governance with the goal to increase community participation and reward members based on the level of their contributions. Big changes are looming on the horizon and, as a member, please rest assured that you will play a significant part in bringing them forth.
I'm filled with gratitude as I write this. The 19 year-old me who left Romania to be a student in London would have never thought that, 5 years later, a small act of registering a new domain name with an unusual tld would lead to what shesaid.so is today. While I'm working on clarifying what it will be, I think we can all look back with pride on what it has been. When I sat down to create the very first shesaid.so community platform (the same google group we still use today), I knew we may never reach the ultimate destination in my lifetime. To embark on a journey whose terminus may never be found is a strange feeling for anyone with a strictly logical mindset like mine was eight years ago. And yet I've learned more about myself and my destination from the hidden backwoods that this path has taken me on than I would have from simply crossing the finish line. I'm so excited to continue getting lost together in new ways on the way there.
Yours,
/AM