Spotlight On: EMILY LAZAR
ABOUT this week’s guest:
We are just a couple days away from the Grammy’s and while while we have been hearing that women are currently dominating the Grammy Awards, the research shows that this is far from the case.
A new report, The Missing Voices of Women In Music and Music News, says that, while women have achieved significant recent success in the headline categories the reality is that, between 2017 and 2024, women received only one in five of the Grammy nominations and wins. And, while many of the headlines last year focused on how women had “dominated” or “ruled” at the Grammy’s, the reality is that, in total, fewer than one in four nominees (24%) and one in three winners (32%) were women.
In fact, while news reports focused on the fact that women took home the big four aforementioned awards, if you factor in all the Grammy’s given out in these categories - including for songwriters, producers, engineers and mixers - only 22% went to women, with the remaining 78% going to men. In the Grammy producer of the year category, in the past eight years only 3% of the nominations have gone to women. and for this year’s Grammy’s the report tells us that women have received their highest number of nominations for nine years however, this is still only 28% of the total, with 69% going to men. Of the shockingly low percentages of women that are engineers and producers, there is one woman who started breaking those ceilings over a decade ago, and has now become a change-making organizer and activist for gender equity in the recording industry. This trailblazing nine-time Grammy-nominated mastering engineer, is this week’s guest, Emily Lazar. In 1997, she founded an audio mastering facility called The Lodge in New York City, and has been its president, and chief mastering engineer ever since. And in recent years became the founder of We Are Moving the Needle - a nonprofit organization supporting all women recording industry professionals, audio engineers and producers.
In 2012, Emily became becoming the first female mastering engineer to be nominated for a Grammy for the Foo Fighters album Wasting Light, and in 2019, the first first female mastering engineer to win the Best Engineered Album (non-classical) Grammy, which she won for her work on Beck's Colors.
Then, in 2021, Emily became the first mastering engineer to land 3 Grammy nods for Album of the Year: Haim’s Women In Music Pt III, Djesse Vol 3 by Jacob Collier, and Everyday Life by Coldplay. And this year, she is nominated once again in that prestigious category for Djesse Vol 4 by Jacob Collier. She’s worked with everyone from Bjork to Brittany Howard to Barbra Streisand. and she is working hard to make measurable change happen for gender equality in the recording industry. We are thrilled to welcome Emily Lazar as this week’s SHERO in the Spotlight.