MediaTracks is an independent, family-owned production label that has been delivering original and forward-thinking music to the TV, film, and advertising industries—and beyond—for over 25 years. After recognising a lack of diversity in audiovisual and music production, the company of four set about effecting impactful change, educating artists and clients along the way.
The small but mighty MediaTracks team set a target to ensure that at least 50% of all new artists they work with identify as female. They also set a goal of making sure that 20% of monthly releases are from musicians from diverse backgrounds. The company has already exceeded both goals, with a majority of monthly releases now coming from a diverse roster of artists.
We interviewed María Cecilia Ayalde Ángel, Operations and Partnerships Manager at MediaTracks Music, to learn about MediaTracks’ EDI strategy, motivations and keys to success. We find out more about the EDI activity currently underway, including writer workshops for talented composers experiencing barriers to access. We also explore María’s thoughts on why addressing the lack of diversity and inclusion in the music and audiovisual space is so critical.
What are your motivations for addressing diversity and inclusion within your organisation?
We work in the sector of production music known as library music or stock music and although it's not very glamorous, it makes up a big chunk of the audiovisual industry and the music industry overall. The latest study by BMAT on the proportion of production music used in any audiovisual we consume showed that production music is used six times more than commercial music in Europe and the UK.
Just think about how much audiovisual content we consume every day — ads, Netflix, linear TV, all of that. There's music playing almost all of the time. People don't normally think much about it but this music is written by people — by artists. For many years, they've been in the background of the scene but through MediaTracks, we want to change that.
When the company was acquired by the Saunders family almost four years ago, they wanted to get to know the writers we have in our roster and build those human relationships. They tasked me with writing profiles about our artists and when I put together a gallery of images, I realised we didn't have any diversity at all. We knew that needed to change.
We want to raise more questions like: Who are these artists? Where do they come from? Why is there so little inclusion of female writers? That's a big overall motivation for us.
How are those motivations embedded into your wider company strategy?
The way we started tackling the lack of diversity we found within the company was by first acknowledging that we have some work to do and establishing a base. We did a survey of our composers in 2022, which was completely voluntary, to understand where we stood. We repeat the survey every two years and it highlights what points we need to work on and what the next steps are.
We also acknowledged that we can't make these important changes alone. We don't like to pretend that we're experts on every protected characteristic because that's just not true. So, we get in touch with experts who work with musicians in various areas to learn more about the challenges they're facing. We then set up different strategies and work with different partners, such as Music Production for Women, Leeds Conservatoire, Carousel, Can Do Musos, MOBO Unsung, a charity in Colombia called Fundación IPO, Women in Film and TV, and the British Film Editors (BFE) society, among others.
We're very reliant on our partners and we really work collaboratively with them, which has allowed us to open doors and opportunities to bring more diverse musicians and artists onboard. We've developed a lot of different workshops and different activities with our partners — it has been a really nurturing process for both sides.
What are your main goals and what are you hoping to achieve?
What I want us to achieve is to prove that opening our roster to more diversity equals better music for us. We know that — but the client, who, realistically, is an editor or a music supervisor, isn't going to do a lot of research into who is writing the music. That's fine — we're not planning to change how they work.
However, our goal is to show them that if you put a brief out to 50 composers with the same musical education and a similar life experience, you'll get something good. But if you open that up and show the same brief to people who come from different walks of life, different countries, different cultures, etc., you'll get a much more varied mix of options.
Then, when they pick the best, they can be sure it's going to be the best of the best, not just the best of a little cluster. It just didn't sit right with me to think of us excluding all of these people who could be putting out amazing music. It's about taking extra steps, which we know will make the listening experience better and will make the audience connect better. It's not only the ethical part, i.e., it's the right thing to do, but also artistically, financially and logistically it just makes sense.
What do you believe are the biggest risks of not addressing EDI within your organisation?
I hate to open this Pandora's box, but AI is coming and there's a lot of fuss and a lot of concern about generative making music, which is quite frankly, soulless. If we resign ourselves to not caring about where we're getting our music from and don't care if they're human or not, we start losing the soul. As an industry, if we don't start valuing the people behind our music — and by people, I mean everyone — then we start devaluing the art form itself.
What kinds of EDI activities or resources are you currently running?
One of the tools that we found really, really useful in starting to put our EDI initiatives into action is offering workshops and writing camps. So, working on the educational side, we have two branches and one of them is the writing camps for artists and writers who aren’t familiar with the production music industry. We put them in writing groups and they respond to briefs that have been sent to us by clients over the years. At the end of the writing camps, if we have satisfactory results, we will publish the work as an album that our clients can choose from.
A lot of these kinds of camps are also very gate-kept and you have to have a certain number of followers or contacts. We want to put those barriers down. We do ask participants to send a portfolio and meet certain quality standards but other than that, all we care about is that they want to learn about this side of the industry.
As part of these camps, we run workshops where we answer questions like: What is production music? What are royalties? What's a contract? We then give them the tools they need to pursue a future in making production music part or all of their income. We also try to invite clients to the writing camp so they can actually meet the artist, so we can close that gap between the visual and the audio world, in this case.
The other branch of this EDI activity is with the audiovisual client side — we run music licensing one-on-one workshops with editors, film makers, producers, assistants, etc. and we give them the tools to learn how to commission and use licenced music. As part of our music licensing workshops, we have a section that covers the importance of diversity and inclusion so that clients can recognise the importance of diversity and authenticity in what they are commissioning and writers can do their best for themselves and share their musical knowledge with clients.
Can you share an example of a successful outcome?
We started a project last year after realising that there was a lot of investment into the Welsh production scene and a view to really back up this part of the United Kingdom and their productions in the future. We did a bit of research in libraries for Welsh music and we found very little. What we did find was just very stereotypical Celtic music or choirs and the reality is that, despite it being beautiful, your day-to-day person in Wales is not walking with their headphones listening to that kind of music.
So, we thought, okay, let's gather some Welsh composers and some Welsh artists. We've worked closely with Ifan Pritchard to put together a couple of Welsh writing camps and some production of contemporary music that Welsh people want to listen to today — what Wales sounds like in 2025. We did the writing camp on a Monday and Tuesday and by Saturday, a Welsh company was syncing it.
This is a project we're investing a lot of our time and energy into and we're very happy — it has been one of our biggest successes. We've had a lot of engagement from Welsh production companies who are really keen to support Welsh artists. It's fantastic.
How are you measuring the success of what you’re doing?
The artist side is a bit easier to measure because we can see how many artists we have. We can see, for example, the percentage of female-identifying writers or Black writers we start with each year and measure how diverse our roster is growing. When it comes to the client side, there are different ways of measuring this. This can be a challenge because the timescale for a song to be pitched and then put into the final cut takes months and there's no way we can speed up that process.
So, we're still in the process of working through measuring the client side and we're still around one year behind. However, we can get instant feedback through how people engage, the comments they're giving us, who comes to our events, and who is signing up or contacting us. For us, it's about the quality, not the quantity. We want to build relationships with people who will be models of what we stand for in terms of diversity in the music and audiovisual industries.
What advice or key learning would you share with other organisations considering delivering similar initiatives?
I've touched on this point a couple of times, but partnership really is everything. I think the definition of EDI is mutually exclusive to individualism. You can't promote diversity and inclusion effectively if you're working alone. You need to understand other points of view or the visions — it needs to be a group effort if you really want to make a long-lasting impact.
To learn more about MediaTracks and to download the latest surveys and reports, head to mediatracks.co.uk.
