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Alicia Keys has announced She Is the Music, which is a music industry initiative for female advancement. According to Variety, Keys announced the organization during her speech at the National Music Publishers Association’s annual meeting, where she received the Icon Songwriter honor. She said, “I’ve joined forces with a group of really powerful female executives, songwriters, artists, engineers, producers and publishers to help reshape the industry that we all love by creating real opportunities and a pipeline of talent for other women. We’re calling our initiative She Is the Music. We want to create a model for change that affects women across all industries. We deserve the utmost respect, and so many of these women across industries are telling our culture that time is up on double standards and it is over for pay inequity and colleagues who are at best disrespectful and at the worst unsafe – so it’s over for that.” Keys added, “We have to do something because the statistics are brutal. Of almost 3,000 pop songwriters credited last year, only 12 percent were female. Only 3 percent of the engineers were female, and one of them is [Keys’ engineer] Ann [Mincieli]. Only 2 percent of producers are female and one of them is me. Our world is 50-50 and it’s time for our industry to reflect that.”
