A recent 2023 analysis found that only 2.8% of the most popular songs from the last decade were produced by women. At Bose, we believe that sound is the most powerful force on earth, but it will never reach its full power unless the individuals creating music are as diverse as those listening.
That’s why Bose embarked on its Turn the Dial initiative, in partnership with She Is The Music, Billboard, and Porsche, to address the barriers causing this deficit. Our objectives are to raise awareness of the issue and provide new opportunities for women and non-binary music producers to create music.
We launched the Turn the Dial initiative with a campaign spot, featuring artists and producers H.E.R., PinkPantheress, BLOND:ISH, and WondaGurl. To sustain the campaign, Bose launched a YouTube series, Turn the Dial Sessions, in which a female pop artist is joined by a female producer in the studio to lay down a track in just three hours. To date, the series has featured UK pop star Anne-Marie and Grammy Award-winning pop jazz sensation Laufey, along with producers that were selected in partnership with our social impact partner, She Is The Music, a non-profit organization dedicated to increasing the number of women working in music.
To produce the campaign and the YouTube series, we have worked with a majority female crew and female directors to best serve our mission. Thanks to the nuanced direction of our director, Posy Dixon, the studio sessions of our YouTube series facilitated an unscripted conversation where our artist partners could candidly share their own experiences in the creative process and the music industry at large.
To accompany the launch of our second episode, we partnered with Laufey and Eunike to release their track, “Only Mine,” on Laufey’s YouTube channel.
In addition, we partnered with the Billboard Women in Music Awards to launch the Producer of the Year award, recognizing Rosalía in 2023 and PinkPantheress in 2024.
Making a meaningful impact in growing the percentage of female and non-binary music producers in the industry is challenging to measure, but early quantitative and qualitative results show that our campaign is achieving our core objectives of raising awareness of the issue and providing new opportunities for female producers.
To measure the impact in driving awareness of the issue, we looked at the reach, engagement and ad recall of our campaign content.
Our campaign spot from February 2023 received 300M total impressions.
To date, our YouTube series has received 37.1M views, with view rates 21% above and engagement rates 140% above Bose benchmark, and ad recall lift ranging as high as 6.59% during this initiative.
We have also seen strong awareness building from our artist and producer partners. Combined views of artists’ social postings about the campaign are 13.6M, with nearly 600K views of Laufey and Eunike’s original song, “Only Mine,” on YouTube alone.
In the comments on artists and producers’ posts, we’ve seen strong engagement from their fans about the issue, illustrating that we’re shifting perceptions about the issue. One viewer shared, “I was shocked when in reality only the 3% percent of the music produced was made by women, thank you to both of you, for making our lives much more exciting with your lovely music and astonishing vocals.”
