Ebonie Smith On Why She Believes Only 2.8% Of Music Producers Are Women And An Even Smaller Percentage Are Woman Of Color

Ebonie Smith, the founder and president of New York City’s Gender Amplified Inc, believes only 2.8% of music producers are women and an even smaller percentage are women of color. To help combat this, she founded the organization to develop a pipeline for women and gender non-binary people to get involved in professional recording studios.

Gender Amplified hosts community events and uses multimedia to provide a platform for the advancement of women in music production and to identify and motivate the next generation of women music producers. By doing so, it hosts festivals, seminars and events throughout the year. The non-profit aims to celebrate women in music production, raise their visibility and develop a pipeline for girls and young women to get involved behind the scenes as producers.

Smith is an award-winning music producer, audio engineer and singer-songwriter based in Los Angeles. She currently works as an audio engineer and producer for Atlantic Records and she received her first Grammy Certificate and RIAA-certified platinum plaque for her work as an assistant engineer on Hamilton (Original Broadway Cast Recording).

In addition, she received her second Grammy Certificate for work as an assistant engineer on Sturgill Simpson’s award-winning album A Sailor’s Guide to Earth. Smith has also worked as an engineer on the Grammy-nominated album Dirty Computer by Janelle Monáe and the Grammy-winning album Invasion to Privacy by Cardi B. She currently works as an in-house engineer and producer for Atlantic Records. Additionally, Smith has been elected governor of the New York Chapter of The Recording Academy and is a current member of the Producers & Engineers Wing.

Here, Smith shares with Forbes the inspiration behind starting Gender Amplified, her experience being a Black female producer, how the industry can become more inclusive and more.

Lisa Kocay: What was the inspiration behind starting Gender Amplified?

Ebonie Smith: “Gender Amplified started as a senior thesis project when I was in college at Barnard, a women’s college associated with Columbia University. At the time, I was aspiring to be a music producer and an audio engineer, but on campus, all my peers were guys, and they were great, but I was really curious about women who were using technologies to inform their identities, who were making beats, who were potentially even making music for the radio. I was like, ‘Are they there? Is that a thing? Are they out there?’ So I started to ask around and I started finding little by little these small communities online. I started to reach out to some of these women’s organizations and lo and behold, there were so many cool pockets of women who were producing music, making beats and deejaying.

“There were events dedicated to these women connecting and meeting each other. I felt as if I was thrown into this underground secret society, and one of the founders of one of the organizations told me that perhaps I should use my resources at Columbia to do a festival. I thought this was a fantastic idea, and I went to my thesis advisor and I was like, ‘Hey, I have a really great idea for a senior thesis. Would you support me [in doing] an accompanying thesis conference?’ This was in 2007. I wrote my thesis and my advisor also helped me put together a conference, the first of its kind on women in music production and specifically on hip-hop production because that was the angle of my thesis.

“The conference was called Gender Amplified Women in Technological Innovation in Hip-Hop. That was the beginning, the motivation, apart from it being purely academic and contributing to budding academic discourse around women in technology that was already beginning to form and started in its embryonic stages. It also contributed to this community-building exercise that I didn’t know that’s what I was doing. I was meeting all these women and conducting research for my thesis project and I was astounded by the fact that very few of them knew each other. A few of them did, but most of them didn’t. The conference really was two-fold. It was the amalgamation of my research and all of my adventures in New York City as a buddy music producer and the culmination of all of that effort, but it was also in response to wanting to create some sort of space for all these women to meet each other and get together. Gender Amplified really began in that vein.”

Kocay: Can you talk about some of the events that you host today for Gender Amplified?

Smith: “Our main event right now is called the Control Room series, and it’s not public. It’s a private invite-only music production camp. It’s highly curated. We have funding from Warner Music Group as well as some additional funding from the Recording Academy. NASDAQ is also a funder as well and Spotify that has given us handsome donations in the past. The camps are three to four days. It takes place in Brooklyn at our studio partner, Hyper Valid, [which] comes with a music production and post-house. We bring these women together. They have to fill out an application process. We ask them many questions about their hopes, their desires, their artistic output, how they understand themselves as creatives, what type of technology they use and what community means to them. It’s a very comprehensive application. From there, we then discern which producers will make a good pairing and build out a cohort.

“Our current cohort is 17 producers. They’re coming from all over New York, and actually, some of them are coming from out of state. We have one person coming from Texas and another person coming from California. This program we started in 2019 with a different cohort of young people from the Clive Davis Department of Recorded Music, and actually one of the producers in our current cohort was a part of that original cohort. She’s matriculated into the current iteration of producers that is expanded from just a college age. Now we’re including [people who are] 18 to 41. It’s a large age range and this is our primary focus right now. We keep the cohort small because we like to be able to track them over time and track their progress. It’s for the size of our organization. It helps us manage them and help with career readiness and opportunities. We know everyone personally. We are also cultivating this community on the basis of what it needs to grow collectively and not just to build the careers of the individuals, but to build the careers of the collective. We’ve had success with placing some of the songs from the camp and so we’re continuing to look for professional opportunities for these artists as well as for their catalog of output.”

Kocay: You’ve been a producer for 10 years. What has your experience been like as a Black female producer?

Smith: “The experience for me has been incredible. I’ve had an opportunity to work on many different records for a long time. I’ve worked in-house at Atlantic Records. I started there in 2013 and it’s given me an opportunity to work on a broad range of music. There’s musical theater—my actual first credit was on the “Hamilton” cast album. From there, I’ve got an opportunity to [work] more musical theater, hip-hop and R&B, [and I] got a chance to work in country music and folk music. Actually, one of my projects in the musical theater space is nominated for a Grammy next year, which is fantastic. I got an opportunity to produce on that. It’s called ‘Ready Set Go’ by Divinity Rocks, and it’s nominated in the children’s music category. I worked on folk music this year down in Nashville doing a country album coming up. So I think my work with Gender Amplified has really paved the way for me to work on very interesting projects, especially projects that feature a very strong mission around women’s empowerment. That’s something that really matters to me—that I’ve been able to build a career supporting women, not only through the nonprofit but through the creative work I’ve been able to do as a music producer.”

Kocay: Why do you believe only 2.8% of music producers are women and even smaller presenters are women of color

Smith: “I think there are many answers to that question. I think some of that has to do with how women are socialized. I think it starts sometimes from the types of toys that are even introduced to young girls. I think sometimes the more technologically heavy toys are presented to young boys before they’re presented to girls. I think the socializing of young girls can have a bit to do with it. I think also the ways in which the networks have been built around production have a bit to do with it. The manufacturing of music at the commercial level tends to require the standardizing of systems and the standardizing of processes. So the same producers will be approached over and over again to make records for different artists, which can result in a lack of diversity.

“There’s also the awareness of the field. I think that a lot of women don’t know about the space of producing and creating a career as a producer. I feel like it’s still a job profession that is unknown and that a lot of girls are not necessarily exposed to at the opportune age, which is as children and teenagers. They can start developing the skill set necessary to be competitive by the time they’re of working age and at the age where they can get into the workforce as producers….I definitely would say indoctrination, the ways in which young girls are socialized, awareness of the fields itself, knowing that the craft is there and, in terms of commercial output and the manufacturers of the output, who they’re going to get the records done with and not necessarily wanting to stray from a certain standard of the producers that they work with.”

Kocay: Can you talk more about what the industry can do better aside from straying away from the same producers that they use?

Smith: “I think it’s important for the major commercial music industry to create systems that make it safe for there to be research into different types of producers that are coming from different environments so there’s really equal consideration. There has to be a thirst to find producers that are coming from non-traditional spaces and a willingness to be open to the different interpretations that they bring as well. There has to be an investment in that. Not just a willingness, but a real institutionalized approach and an investment in helping to find these individuals.”

Kocay: If you could go back in time to when you first started Gender Amplified and started making music and you could you give yourself one piece of advice, what would it be?

Smith: “I would tell myself to just stay true to the mission and the ministry of Gender Amplified, which is bringing women music producers together in ways that boost their self-esteem and their self-confidence. I would also tell myself that failure is your greatest asset because it builds confidence and self-esteem. It builds character, but only if you stick with it. Learn to fail until you succeed. That is probably the most gratifying thing that I’ve been able to experience: failure to success.”

Kocay: I feel like sometimes it’s needed. It helps you grow a lot.

Smith: “It’s critical, especially as a music producer because there’s no school for it. It’s all trial and error. So the more you fail, the closer you’re getting to refining the skillset and the craft.

Kocay: Is there anything else that you think I should know?

Smith: “Gender Amplified is continuing to do our Control Room series camps and is looking to partner with a distribution partner that wants to help us get the music out to the people. The camps are producing some incredible songs.”