Folk on the Rocks pledges to put more women in this year's music lineup

Forty-five music festivals around the world have pledged to include more women in their line ups this year, including Yellowknife's Folks on the Rocks.

This year will mark the 38th Folk on the Rocks music festival in Yellowknife. Sarah Carr-Locke, the chair of the selections committee, which decides what performers end up on stage at one of the North's top summer festivals.

"We made a conscience choice this year to try and focus more on female-fronted bands, so not all female bands but to have the women take kind of a front seat and to try and be more conscience about that," Carr-Locke says.

The move is being led by U.K. talent firm PRS Foundation, which founded a program called Keychange in the hopes of "empowering women to transform the future of the music industry." The festivals have pledged to make their lineups 50 per cent gender balanced by 2022.

Carr-Locke says they want to make sure that diversity is reflected in the Folk on the Rocks lineup.

"We looked back at our festival last year and realized that we had two headliners that were men, solo male acts and they were awesome but we thought maybe we want to have a different message about supporting female artists."

Carr-Locke says they have about 32 acts booked for the festival this year and about 80 per cent are led by women and transgender artists.

"Believe me the bottom line is that people need to get bums in seats and they need people to buy tickets," says Colleen Allen, a music professor at Humber College and a sax player who has performed all over the world.

She says industry wouldn't be moving in this direction if they weren't confident that the change would be successful.

Allen says there are already four major Canadian festivals that have pledged to make sure diversity is reflected in their lineups.