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Making BRITs voters more diverse will change nothing, says fRoots editor
By Andy Malt | Published on Tuesday 8 November 2016
The editor of folk and roots music magazine fRoots, Ian Anderson, has said that changes to the diversity of the BRITs Voting Academy will have little effect on the diversity of the eventual award winners. The true power is still held by “the same little self-appointed cabals who dictate the playlists for our main radio channels and the same editors who call the shots over which records get reviewed”, he reckons.
In a letter to the Guardian, he said: “It’s a fine thing that the BPI, which oversees the BRITs, has radically overhauled its voting academy for the awards to correct the gender, age and ethnicity imbalance. However, the fact that ‘for music to be nominated for a BRIT award, it still must have charted in the Top 40 that year’ means that not a lot will really change. It will still be the same little self-appointed cabals who dictate the playlists for our main radio channels and the same editors who call the shots over which records get reviewed and which artists get featured in our mainstream newspapers and magazines. The gatekeeper selection is already made long before what’s left reaches the [BRITs voting] panel”.
As previously reported, the BPI yesterday began inviting music industry professionals and commentators to vote in the 2017 edition of its big awards, with a focus on bringing in more women and fewer white men to the process. This follows criticism of last year’s ceremony, at which every single winner was white, despite the musicians finding success in 2015 having been pretty diverse.
“I’m really proud that we’ve taken firm action to refresh the Academy to ensure that it keeps up with trends in music and society at large”, said the Chair of BRITs owner the BPI, Ged Doherty. Although Anderson’s comments highlight that within the mainstream music and media industries, these trends are not necessarily being matched.
