jonattonyeah From RA’s op-ed when they shut down the poll:
"If our goal was to reflect the past year in electronic music, our 2016 DJ and Live Act polls were the culmination of a growing feeling: that the homogeneity of the results didn’t represent the diversity of the scene. Musically, they featured just a portion of the music we cover and that gets played in clubs. But that’s a comparatively trivial point. More pressingly, the DJ and Live Act lists were overwhelmingly dominated by men, mostly from the US and Europe. They didn’t represent the reality of electronic music in 2016, a scene in which countless incredibly talented women play to packed clubs each weekend. To continue running these features would be to diminish the vital contribution they make to electronic music.
It’s also important to remember that dance music is an art form born in queer communities, shaped by people of colour and populated by artists of all genders. But, simply put, this isn’t something you’d know by looking at the recent results of our polls. At best, the lists misrepresented the reality of the scene; at worst, they helped to reinforce some of its harmful power dynamics, which still favour white men above everyone else. This is reason enough to make a change. "
https://ra.co/features/3105
