Spotlight On: EBONIE SMITH OF GENDER AMPLIFIED

ABOUT this week’s guest:

If you are a regular listener to SHEROES, you’ve heard us talk a lot about the lack of women and nonbinary producers and engineers in the music industry. But today’s episode will show us that there is another way of looking at the numbers, which admittedly, can feel a bit depressing at times. For example, the findings of the latest report published in January 2025 by USC Annenberg’s Inclusion Initiative, Inclusion in the Recording Studio? concluded that despite reaching a 12-year high in 2023 of 6.5% the percentage of women producers was still below 10%. The ongoing report, which is often quoted in the media, in its most recent iteration, examined 13 years and 1,300 songs from the Billboard Hot 100 year-end charts from 2012 to 2024. But what about all the producers and engineers who are not producing music that is on the charts? Shifting our focus to elevating and amplifying the many women and nonbinary producers and engineers that are working, is the perspective that our guest Ebonie Smith embodies, and is carrying forward. With a masters degree in music technology from NYU, this music producer, audio engineer, and singer-songwriter’s career achievements include becoming the senior audio engineer and producer at Atlantic records, and a portfolio of credits including the Broadway cast album of Hamilton, Janelle Monae's 2018 album Dirty Computer, and Cardi B's Invasion of Privacy. We’ll hear the story of how Ebonie’s path revealed itself while doing her undergraduate studies at Barnard college, leading her to found the nonprofit Gender Amplified in 2007, with the mission to to celebrate women and gender-expansive music producers, raise their visibility and develop a pipeline for them to build equity in the music industry. She now also serves as the co-chair of the producers & engineers wing of the Recording Academy. If that wasn’t already enough to talk about, Gender Amplified just released an EP of songs produced in their CTRL Room Series production camps, called In Bloom.