Features
Ladies’ Days At TMW
Appearing to make good on her promise that half of the panelists at this year’s Tallinn Music Week will be female, event organiser Helen Sildna has announced that Viv Albertine – guitarist in all-female punk band The Slits – will be among them.
Apart from her success with The Slits, last year her autobiography, “Clothes, Clothes, Clothes, Music, Music, Music, Boys, Boys, Boys” was named MOJO’s Book of the Year.
Joining her among the speakers will Marie Dimberg, the most influential woman in the Swedish music business, according to industry newsletter Musikindustrin. Dimberg, who played a major role in the creation of Roxette and is still the manager of the Swedish duo, is already making the right noises.
Aformer corporate player when she was vice president of EMI International in London, her recipe for company success is apparently that “a good mix of men and women would be necessary, regardless of the industry.”
Sildna’s plan to make sure about half of the TMW panelists are female was apparently inspired by her visit to the recent Where’s The Music? conference in Norrköping (Feb. 12-14), where Swedish gender quotas make the country a forerunner for equal rights issues.
She’s also searched the entire breadth of the music business to include Andrea von Foerster, a music supervisor for Hollywood-based Firestarter Music, which has sourced music for TV programmes such as “Grey’s Anatomy,” “The OC,” “Rescue Me” and “Roswell.”
She’ll be in Tallinn for the first panel the conference has hosted on how to get music into films and commercials.
Sildna, who last year collected the Tampere Music Award at the Music & Media conference in Finland, has also confirmed Georgia Taglietti (Spain’s Sonar Festival), Anna Hildur Hildibrandsdottir (NOMEX), Maria Semushkina (Russia’s Usadba Jazz Festival) and Natasha Padabed (More Zvukov Agency in The Netherlands). Tallinn Music Week is March 25-29.