Festivals Pledge To Fight For Gender Balance

PRS’s Keychange Foundation is trying to improve the gender gap in the music industry by bringing more female artists to festival line-ups. In the recent years, a lot of music events faced scrutiny for being dominated by male performers and participants – a trend that the recent music festival and conference pledge is trying to tackle.

The initiative has been supported by 45 international music festivals which have agreed to achieve or maintain a 50:50 gender balance in their line-ups by 2022. The programme of change is supposed to help cultivate talent, empower women, create a better and more open environment for performers and lead to long-term, positive change in the music industry.

More information can be found on keychange.eu

New Music  

Natalie Prass announced that this year she will be releasing a new album, The Future And The Past, a follow up to her self-titled debut from 2015. Her new record will come out on June 1st via ATO Records. The very first song promoting the album is ‘Short Court Style’.

Prass is currently touring the US, but she is also scheduled to perform in the Netherlands and the UK in April. The artist will visit London, Brighton, Manchester, Birmingham and Glasgow before heading back to America in June.

Chvrches are also ready to be releasing new music in 2018, the first time since 2015’s Every Open Eye.  The band has revealed a tracklist for their new record Love Is Dead, which will be out on May 25th via Glassnote. The album will include the group’s comeback single ‘Get Out’ and the newest track, ‘My Enemy’, which features The National’s Matt Berninger. Chvrches will also be back on tour soon, starting with a performance at Barcelona’s Primavera on May 31st, followed by festivals across Europe. 

New Tour Dates and Announcements

The Rolling Stones have just announced that they will be back on tour in the summer of 2018, visiting stadiums across Europe. The new dates will include concerts in Ireland and the UK, as well as some of the European destinations, which have not been included in the band’s previous touring schedule, such as Berlin and Stuttgart in Germany, Marseille in France, Prague in the Czech Republic and Warsaw in Poland. The tour will kick off in Dublin on May 17th.

Metallica also revealed that American dates will be added to their tour, which is set to begin on March 27th in Denmark. Metallica will visit a handful of European countries, including Germany, Austria, Czech Republic, Switzerland, Poland, Hungary, Norway, Sweden and Finland, before travelling to North America in September to start the US leg of their tour in Madison, Wisconsin. The band is planning to tour the US for a few months, until March 2019.

Jessie Ware was also ready to announce that she will be taking her live performances to the US after finishing touring in the UK and Europe. The British singer will start touring America in April with her first concert being at one of the world’s most famous music festival, Coachella. Ware is then set to tour in the United States until the beginning of September.