Humanities Honors Program

While there’s significant and well-deserved coverage of electronic music’s older female pioneers, there isn’t yet sufficient academic or professional energy devoted to understanding the achievements of young women working today.

Starting in 2012, USC’s Annenberg Inclusion Initiative has since reported that 2023 was the year with the highest recorded percentage of female producers at 6.5%.1 This is still a remarkably low, disappointing amount. For that reason (and more), I’m excited to highlight three important female producers working today who, despite not reaching arbitrary standards of musical success (charting, for instance), have indeed managed to cultivate a formidable discography, release critically-acclaimed or well-received albums, establish themselves in a burgeoning music industry, have achieved name recognition, have signed to reputable recording labels, and regularly perform their music on tour.

I’m specifically focusing on three young female producers working primarily in experimental electronic music, each of whom carry a comparatively smaller audience. (For all intents and purposes, audiences at or under approximately 500,000 listeners qualify as small.) As such, notable contemporary performers like Björk, Karin Dreijer (Fever Ray, The Knife), Goldfrapp, Grimes, Imogen Heap, Laura Les, Santigold, Charli XCX (et cetera), while indeed qualifying as female producers of electronic music, do not qualify in the stipulations I’ve laid out with regard to age or size of listening audience (in other words, fame), and as such will not be my subjects of exploration. I’ll also be excluding analysis of artist groups—specifically, duos and trios. For this reason, I won’t be looking at collaborative EPs or albums done by my featured producers.