Shortly before Covid-19 shut the concert industry down, Noelle Scaggs, one of the singers in the alt-pop band Fitz and the Tantrums, began noticing that there was seldom anyone else like her on the road.
A Black woman in a band of white men, Scaggs saw few other women of color on festival stages. Behind the scenes — among the touring crews and other industry personnel she came into contact with — the situation was no different. “Most of the time,” Scaggs said in an interview, “I was the only woman of color in any room.” Over the summer, as Black Lives Matter protests pushed the music industry into self-examination, with major record labels promising to diversify their ranks, Scaggs began developing a plan to break the homogeneity of the.