Meet The Record Label Charging Women Less Due To Wage Inequality

Independent record label M’lady’s Records have been stirring controversy online with their new policy. Earlier this week, the Portland indie label announced that women will only have to pay 77 percent of list price for all of their mail orders.

The number will sound familiar to some readers. The US Bureau of Labour Statistics reports that among full-time employees, women still earn less than men – the oft-quoted ratio is $0.77 for every dollar a man earns, though admittedly there are various ways to interpret the disparity.

As NPR notes, M’Lady’s Records is not the first music outlet to institute such a policy. A Brooklyn bar and a Pittsburgh pop-up boutique both recently drew attention for charging based on the same price structure.

“This number gets hotly debated all the time,” M’lady’s Records’ Brett Lyman tells NPR. “But it’s a good place to start, I reckon.” And, unlike the bar, M’Lady’s policy isn’t just a one-day thing, nor is it a travelling project aimed at education, like the boutique’s.

M’Lady’s is a small record company, which describes itself as “radical[ly] feminist and willfully obstinate”. Despite relying on sales to survive, the label says it will keep the change in place “until that number gets tuned up and/or we go down in flames”.

“We’re just tired of record labels being these petit bourgeois institutions that don’t really have much impact on their communities. Most just seem inert to me; vague curatorial exercises largely rooted in making money or pacifying some parochial sub-culture,” Lyman tells NPR.

“It’s rare enough these days to see labels operate with an ethos, and rarer still to see that ethos extended to how they conduct their non-creative affairs. So… time to start lobbing some (admittedly tiny) grenades into the lobby. Hopefully it’ll ruin someone’s brunch plans.”

Lyman says he’s not particularly concerned about how the policy will affect the label’s bottom line and is instead more interested in engaging with the community. “If we were in this to stay fiscally sound, it would have been abandoned before it even started. We’d just go make espresso in a food truck… and grow a beard,” he says.

According to Lyman, the new initiative has been “very well received” by the label’s fans, though M’Lady’s did recently take to Facebook to address some of their critics. “Thank you to the hundreds of people who’ve written us with support,” they wrote.

“And thanks likewise to the handful of incoherent and outraged fellas who see this as the appropriate place to dump all of their disenfranchised feelings. But please, if you’re planning to write in with the same five or six tired links that ‘prove’ the wage gap is a ‘myth’, we’ve already seen them.”

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“Not one of them checks out as anything other than spurious, unverifiable link dumps full of… well, nothing much, really.” The label also insists the move is not sexist, “Because nothing in our actions, words or deeds is implying or suggesting that one sex is superior to another?”

Of course, there is the matter of just how M’Lady’s will know who is placing the online orders and what their chromosomes look like. “Well, most of our orders are paid for via online payment services where one would need an account and verify their identity that way,” says Lyman.

“If anyone’s gonna go to the trouble of conjuring a fake identity and getting fake credit cards in their name just so they can order some punk records from li’l old us, fair play — that 23 percent has been EARNED.”