Behind the scenes: women and music management

When Paloma Macias walks into a room, she is hard to miss. She struts in, clad in a faux fur coat and bright pink hair as if straight out of a Doors song. She’ll introduce herself as if she’s famous, and listen for your name back as if you are, too.

That is how she stepped into venues ever since she was 13 and her relationship with the music industry began. That is how she wanted to be remembered: a 20th Century Fox.

“I was always friends with the older kids,” she often tells me, and together they traveled from show to show around the Northeast Los Angeles underground music community. Together they had made the music their own, turning the experience into the coming of age love story familiar in local music scenes.

When Macias moved to London to study abroad in the fall semester of her freshman year  at UC Berkeley, she did so with “combative energy,” intent on integrating herself into such a community again. After attending a few shows around the area, she found the London-based band Film and knew she was back home again.

“I use this line from Almost Famous which I love where Penny Lane turns and says, if you ever get homesick you can just pull out a record and you’re back with your friends again,” she said. “It was this experiential whirlwind of kinetic energy. I just felt transported, not only to Los Angeles but I felt transported to being in love, to being 16, to having no worries.”

After that first night, she knew she had to get involved. She didn’t just want to be there, she wanted to make it happen. She wanted to help them just as they had helped her return home for that brief moment.

She described seeing the band for the first time as “feeling like someone understands you and you can feel the music in your chest. It’s grounding but also uplifting. It replicates the feeling of being in love and all the great parts about it, like the butterflies in your stomach. I was looking for a band that made me feel that and I found that in Film.”

And almost instantly, she delved in head first. She decided to speak to them and fill in a role as their interim manager. It didn’t matter that she wasn’t going to get paid, it didn’t matter that she was only around for a semester and the chances of the band exploding in fame within that time frame were nonexistent. Macias said that all that mattered to her was giving back. She described their music as a gift, so she set off to return the favor.

She got to work, first by engaging in “tireless music promotion,” bringing dozens of friends to each show and introducing Film to those in charge of the underground music circuit. From there she worked on visual elements for the band, storyboarding a music video and recruiting a cast of photographers, cinematographers and other  artists from the London School of Art for its production. 

While working on the band’s aesthetic and promotion was rewarding, Macias at times found it was difficult to be taken seriously as a woman, especially a young one from America among a crowd of older male Brits.

“I really had to stick up for myself,” she said. Although the bandmates openly expressed distrust of Macias, due to what she believes is her nationality, youth and gender, she continued to work for them throughout the rest of her semester in London.

When she returned home, Macias was slightly off put by the resentment she said she experienced from the men in the industry, but she knew she had to continue where she left off. It wasn’t until she discovered Oakland-based band The Sleeps during a band night at Thorsen House did she realize where she was to pick up from. At that show, she felt that same nostalgia when she first saw Film which perfectly colored memories of her youth. After several meetings she was officially hired as their manager, and hopped back on the same grind that overwhelmed her schedule in London. Almost instantly, the band expressed desire for a SoCal tour and almost instantly she decided to deliver. She would fulfill the dreams of the band while being rewarded solely with the satisfaction, the experience, and the music.

“I worked 2 full time jobs at the time, Sunday through Friday, so within my 15 minute breaks I was incessantly calling every venue I knew in LA, sending out follow up emails,” she said. “I was reaching out via social media to bands, people to make posters for each event, [finding] a set of artists. I [was] constantly on call with venues, artists, both visual artists, and then I did phone banking to ensure guests attendance.”

During the tour, Macias was also occupied with managing money, pushing the band’s social media as well as merch. Day by day she got more tired, yet day by day her skin got tougher. But although the practical aspects of the tour presented great difficulty for her, the hardest part appeared to stem from the hidden misogyny prevalent in the music industry.

“I would go on meetings, or dates that would be disguised as meetings, or vice versa, and just having men try to exploit me for my work, and to do work for free,” she said.

In a report by the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism division, it was found that in 2017, 83.2 percent of artists identified as male and 16.8 percent identified as female. Likewise, 98 percent of producers were male and the remaining 2 percent female. 

Macias saw these statistics firsthand while volunteering and contacting the dozens of male-run music venues she reached out to for the tour. Although this was undoubtedly a challenging obstacle, her strength of character pushes her to continue working.

“I’ve personally gained such a strong sense of self that I refuse to now be treated in ways like this,” she said. 

When asked about her future prospects in the industry, Macias says she doesn’t want “to say no and have it be reflective of the horrible way the men I had to work with and for treated me.” Instead, she is looking at pursuing large-scale work in the same industry, such as organizing festivals. 

Despite some of her negative experiences, Macias refuses to be stopped. She continues to strut into rooms the same way she did when she was 13, her perspective on music as romantic as ever.

Article by Alice Markman

Photos courtesy of Danielle Drislane