Quick Hits: Werk It Festival and a look at label services

Brief news items and worthy reads from around the web:

Highlights from Werk It: Vanity Fair published a recap of the Werk It Festival, a podcasting conference for women. WNYC hosted the three-day Los Angeles event that aimed to discuss industry trends and improving all types of diversity in a field where the majority of both hosts and listeners are men, and mostly affluent and white within the gender breakdown. The event included live show tapings and panels featuring talents such as N’Jeri Eaton, senior manager of programming acquisitions for NPR, and Emmy-winning writer Lena Waithe.

How label services are changing alongside labels: Pandora’s Glenn Peoples profiled Label Logic, and examined the role of label services businesses at a time when labels’ role in the music industry is in a state of flux. The advent of streaming services have changed the needs for distribution, licensing, and marketing for artists, and those tasks can now be shouldered by a range of professionals outside the traditional label structure. The shifting responsibilities of labels and label services will be critical to understand, as licensing deals with the majors remains important for streaming music services.

Anna Washenko