NEW YORK - The music industry has long evaded a #MeToo reckoning like that experienced in Hollywood or the media, but the
But wider cultural shifts in the industry long-cliched as a bastion of sex, drugs and rock and roll didn’t seem to crystallise. “A lot of survivors that I’ve spoken with from the music industry, they’ve internalised the rock star idea – that they should have expected” bad behaviour, “because he was a rock star,” she told AFP.Professor Kate Grover – a women’s and gender studies professor at Washington and Lee University, who has researched intersections of gender and the music industry – said the notion of “geniuses” is also particularly pronounced in music.
And pop’s top musicians are frequently empires in their own right, said Prof Heldman, “who employ people who help them in their years of perpetration”. The myriad allegations underscored “the gravity of the situation” wrote singer-songwriter and activist Tiffany Red, who has worked with Ms Ventura, in an open letter to Combs in December 2023.
Prof Heldman also pointed to “perverse market incentives”: Kelly’s sales jumped more than 500 per cent after his racketeering conviction, with streams jumping 22 per cent over the week that followed.