Krissi Murison's appointment as editor of the NME is testament to her talent and hard work, but also to the fact that parts of the music industry have genuinely changed. You'd never dream of asking Lily Allen or Florence Welch how they felt about being a woman in the music industry, mostly because there are so many diverse example of female artists out there. I do a monthly podcast and recently asked my producer, Becky, whether "we needed to try and get some boys on the playlist". How times change.
I doubt that Murison's years at NME featured many gender-related incidents; being really into something is a great leveller. I'm one of a handful of women called on to write about funky house, or the revival of Italian cosmic disco, or to interview old soul DJs, and in all the years, the most sexist thing anyone's said was that I had a good record collection "for a girl".
I was in a minority, but I had excellent role models in Mancunian music writer Mandi James and Sheryl Garrett, then editor of the Face. Today, 64% of journalism students are female, according to an American survey, with which I'd agree anecdotally from my time lecturing at the London College of Communication and Goldsmiths. So where do they all go? Not into the pages of mainstream music magazines, where women are still in a minority of one or two. It's a glass plug, as well as a glass ceiling.
It is the same elsewhere in the mainstream music business. More than a hundred of the 130 music industry experts polled for the BBC's Sound of 2009 poll were men. Major record labels still resemble the City, with a handful of women in lucrative positions of power. And according to three experienced label executives, this is unlikely to change. The same appears to be true over at new media hubs such as MySpace and Spotify.
That is not the case in the fertile margins of British music. Street music magazine RWD has a female editor, Hattie Collins, as well as numerous young, female writers and bloggers (I counted 13). Aim, the body that represents independent record labels, is headed by Alison Wenham, and Rinse FM, the one-time pirate station, is co-run by the indomitable Sarah Lockhart.
Murison's appointment may make other girls persevere, but if they're really interested in making it in music then they had best swerve the mainstream and do their own thing instead.
• Emma Warren writes for Observer Music Monthly
