Launching a record label in this day and age isn’t exactly a great ordeal. Time was you needed money to sign artists, design your logo, create artwork and sleeves for physical media, record music, pay distributors and so on. It was a big and enormously expensive undertaking.

Not these days. If I wanted to set up a label to get my music on Traxsource, I’d need a name, a logo and a distributor to get the tracks there. That’s about it. And you don’t even have to do that. You can just open a Bandcamp page and sell from there instead.

Which is exactly what Shanghai party Scandal have done. They’ve set up a label and put out a compilation featuring solely women artists. And this got me thinking about another campaign – 23×23 – whose purpose is to increase the number of women releasing music. 23% by 2023 is their hopelessly modest goal.

But their campaign fails straight away due to it relying on the old boy network which deters more women from releasing music. They seem to forget the lessons from dance music’s early days – if someone isn’t doing the party you want, start your own. Create your own labels, and release music solely from women. There’s nothing to stop anyone doing this.

For instance, take this blog. Over the past few years, I’ve started to get fed up of the dance music press failing to cover various issues properly. Three years ago, I was amongst a small number publishing stories about Chicago house DJ Sterling Void. Not one of the dance press started writing about it, despite being invited a number of times.

Put simply, Amateur’s House exists because I decided no one could better enact my own vision than myself. So the 23×23 campaign could do women one hell of a service by urging them to launch their own labels and sign each other’s tracks. Dance music could do with some more competition to make things interesting…