Spice Girl Mel B mentions songs sector sexism in the 1990s

Spice Girl Melanie Brown, much better referred to as Mel B or Scary Spice, has actually mentioned the sexism that the lady team dealt with in a male-dominated songs sector throughout the 1990s.

Speaking to’s Tania Bryer, Brown, that came to be a participant of the renowned British pop team upon its development in 1994, spoke about a battle to be taken seriously.

“We entered into the industry at a time when it was all boy bands and so many doors were slammed in our face like ‘girl bands are not going to work’ and we’d be like ‘yes they are, you’ll see when we’re rich and famous,'” Brown claimed last month in an episode of “The Conversation.”

“But we were just on a mission, and we managed to do it.”

The renowned band was assembled by Heart Management, which held tryouts for a lady team that would certainly take on prominent British kid bands at the time. The team is comprised of 5 participants: Brown, Melanie Chisholm, Emma Bunton, Geri Halliwell-Horner, and Victoria Beckham.

The team’s “girl power” rule brought in a young, mostly women fanbase and released them to the top of the graphes.

The Spice Girls’ launching solitary “Wannabe” in 1996 was a number one hit in around 30 countries and the initial cd “Spice” came to be the globe’s top-selling cd of 1997. The team has actually taken place to market greater than 85 million documents worldwide.

“We wrote all of our own songs so we’d all be there writing lyrics together going ‘no we need to empower women, we need to make sure that girls don’t feel like they have to conform to this or to that,'” Brown informed.

“When we came out in the early 90s it was still very male predominant, you know, every interview, every board meeting that we went to, it was all male, and now you do see women in positions of power, not enough, not clearly enough, but it is changing,” she included.

There have actually been step-by-step renovations in sex variety in the songs sector scene in the U.K. The 2024 Glastonbury Festival included 2 women headlining substitute the very first time in its over 50-year background

Meanwhile, the U.K. Music Diversity Report 2024, which evaluated 2,874 individuals functioning behind the scenes of the songs sector, located that females in elderly settings had actually climbed from 40.4% in 2020 to 48.3% in 2024.

However, sex equity in the songs sector still has a lengthy method to go. The record likewise located that females were most likely to be paid much less than males. Overall, 55% of participants that claimed they were unsettled were females, and just 30% of male participants claimed the exact same.

On the various other hand, 53.2% of males were making greater than ₤ 100,000 (about $131,000) while just 43.4% of females were likewise making as much or a lot more.

Additionally, 51% of females in the U.K. songs sector have actually claimed they experienced discrimination while functioning as an artist, compared to just 6% of males, according to the 2024 Women Musicians Insight Report collected by Musician’s Census.

Almost a 3rd of women participants claimed they were sexually bugged while functioning as an artist compared to 5% of males, per Musician’s Census.

Chisholm has formerly claimed that the team’s “girl power” motto was influenced by their deal with sex discrimination in the sector, according to a meeting with electrical outlet Female First in 2018.

“When we started, we were a pop group and we just wanted to sing and be famous and travel the world and we never really thought about that side of things at all. But, as soon as we were heading into the music industry, we started to be faced with some sexism. We were told girls don’t sell,” Chisholm claimed.

“It gave us even more determination to succeed because we realised very early on, we weren’t just doing it for ourselves and each other, we were doing it for girls. Being told we couldn’t do something was like a red rag to a bull to the Spice Girls,” she included.