Gritty In Pink Founder Shira Yevin On Five Years Of Jamming

Five years ago today (January 22) Gritty in Pink founder Shira Yevin convened the first ever Gritty In Pink All GRL Jam at the Satellite. As Yevin recalls, “This first event featured top talent including Kiki Wong (Guitarist, Smashing Pumpkins) and Eva Gardner (bassist, P!NK).”

Of course, at the time, she didn’t know what that jam would lead to. “While we didn’t formally launch the company or the INPINK platform until a couple of years later, this was our origin story, and we are very proud of this milestone!”

Five years and one day later they’ll be hosting a jam at NAMM, which will kick off a big 2025. “This year, Gritty In Pink will have a presence at Warped Tour, with an onsite footprint at all festivals, highlighting the tour’s female artists. We will also have official events and programming leading up to each festival, including pre-parties,” Yevin says.” As for the business, exciting updates include our pilot with Live Nation to be an official content partner in their venues, as well as expanding focus on concierge services for bigger events and brands, providing team staffing and sourcing for talent on and off stage (content, hosts etc). For example recently, we were hired to provide videography and audio talent for the Femme It Forward Gala. In addition, we will be launching a subscription this year, which we are thrilled to announce in the coming months.”

I spoke with Yevin about Gritty In Pink’s drive to help women in all walks of the music industry.

Steve Baltin: Tell me about the jam at NAMM.

Shira Yevin: We’ve been doing this series, All Girl Jam, for a while, we were doing it quarterly. This year we’ve had a different cadence, but it’s 50 women and non-binary musicians performing theme cover songs. [It’s] the best female musicians in L.A. like Eva Gardner, the bassist for Pink and incredible talent. So yeah, excited to have you come experience it.

Baltin: Last month’s jam fell into a fundraiser, correct?

Yevin: We’re doing a drive to raise capital, yes, exactly. We are driving towards the close of our million-dollar pre -seed round. We’ve raised about 700 to date, and we have additional commitments in the pipeline. So, we’re very excited to close that round. Live Nation is the lead investor, as you know, and then we’ve had Gaingels and Alternative Wealth Partners and then a bunch of incredible, strategic angel investors, like Kevin Lyman, come on board.

Baltin: What is the goal with the money? What are you planning on doing with it?

Yevin: We are excited to build out the tech portion of the In-Pink platform to incorporate AI and we’re building an AI matching tool as well as an AI powered fair pay scale, because women actually make 50 percent less on these digital freelance platforms like Fiverr and it’s because they’re underpricing their services. So, we hope to equip women with better tools to fairly price their services. Not to mention all the other headaches that freelancers have to face like chasing down payments and invoicing. So, in addition to that we are going to be launching a subscription on the freelance side to help freelancers not only stay on top of their business but also stay on top of emerging technologies. Some of my research has yielded some fun facts, like in 11 years up to 85 percent of the jobs that college grads will have haven’t even been invented yet. So, today’s session musician might be tomorrow’s music prompt engineer. We want to help women stay on top of the emerging technologies and also help companies source that talent.

Baltin: That seems like a good segue into what Gritty in Pink is for those unfamiliar.

Yevin: Gritty In Pink really started as a community and we were more focused on musicians, but then we launched this marketplace for women working in all aspects of the industry. It’s essentially almost like a female-powered Upwork. It’s a destination to hire female freelancers starting with the music industry. We have a big vision to expand into other verticals and really become that global destination for women in the gig economy in all industries. So really starting in music, then events and conferences, moving into other aspects of the entertainment business. Then we’re looking at other male -dominated arenas like sports, which women’s sports is certainly having a turning point. But yeah, we’re excited to expand. So, in addition to music and audio and live talent, you can hire business, graphics, marketing, and then local services like photo, video, which we’re really leaning into and seeing no shortage of demand for, with social media content being very video driven. The In Pink platform is our big platform, but we’re not just a platform — we’re a movement, a community, we’ve been doing these all-girl jams since January 2020 so we’re coming up to the five-year anniversary of our first jam. Even though the marketplace is only a couple years old we started as a community, we had three magical months of jams and then of course COVID hit so we are doing these Instagram live stream fundraisers and raising money for charities. That evolved into workshops over Zoom for songwriting and social media tips. We eventually landed on the marketplace as being the best way to help women in the industry. Because at the end of the day, what do women need? Get hired and get paid.

Baltin: Are you seeing inroads?

Yevin: I think it starts with the industry and we’re seeing more progress on the executive side with more female executives crawling up. Then we’re starting to see more support for female artists coming out. Hopefully that will trickle down into the studio ecosystem. When you look at the percentage of women executives, it’s slowly creeping up. We’re definitely not at parity yet. But I think we do see some progress, which is giving us hope. We’re just going to keep up the fight.

Baltin: What is necessary to push change forward?

Yevin: I think education is a big part of it and mentoring. You have platforms like Live Nations Femme It Forward that they’re doing a mentoring program and helping women from the very start of their careers feel comfortable and supported in those arenas to learn. They can show up and say, “Hey, I can do it too.” So, I think for us, we are incorporating an upskilling part of the platform where we can help women gain these skills and gain this experience. A lot of it also is the networks. You got the old boys club, right? How do you get these gigs? Most of these jobs aren’t even posted. A lot of it is word of mouth. Beyond that, it’s also about collaboration. When you get to the gig, there’s not really a lot of onboarding time. You have to know what you’re doing. We want to help women feel comfortable in these arenas.

Baltin: Gritty In Pink tends to work more with rock and punk artists like that. As I mentioned, there are all the younger pop artists like Billie Eilish Olivia Rodrigo who have the rock/punk ethos. So, is there an objective to team with more of these artists who are more mainstream because they seem to have they have the gritty ethos?

Yevin: Absolutely, Olivia Rodrigo is a great example because she has an all -girl band. My former guitarist is her bassist now. Shout out to Moa Munoz, she’s played gritty jams before. Leanne Bowes and Constance Antoinette, who both play for Demi Lovato, are also In Pink artists. I think it’s cool when you get that crossover of big pop stars who are also feminist in a sense, and they’re not just talking about it, but they’re hiring women. They’re using female bands. The other thing is when you look at Beyonce and Taylor Swift, these huge artists that obviously are at the top of the heap, they are still talking about their challenges as being female artists. I always say it’s kind of incredible. Like if Taylor Swift is having issues what does that say for the rest of us about what the journey is going to be like?

Baltin: if we’re revisiting this at the end of 2025, what would be your biggest accomplishment in 2025?

Yevin: As I mentioned, we’re focusing on our tech development on launching our subscription and then we are very excited about Warped Tour coming back. And Kevin Lyman is not only a mentor and advisor, but an investor in our company. We’re excited about leveraging that platform. It’s certainly a huge part of our origin story, as you know, with crashing the tour and creating a stage for over 300 female-fronted artists, including Paramore. So, we’re excited to tap into that legacy by having presence on some Warped tour and we’re in discussion with Live Nation on throwing events around that. And I think that’s going to be a big tool for us to leverage to create growth. So yeah, we’re very excited about that. But essentially, we’re looking at touring packages leading up to each festival, regionally and then official pre -parties. We’ve had all-girl jams with different themes, like we’ve had an emo jam. So, we’re looking at a women of Warped type of theme where we can not only cover female artists that have played the tour, but also bring in artists that are playing the tour past and present to be part of these events. I think for us too, it’s not just about tapping into the actual festivals, which we’ll have a presence and we’re going to be working with some of the artists to do meet and greet, things like that. We want to use this to raise our profile in the industry, because we are essentially an industry platform, we’re a B2B platform. So that’s the part that we want to be able to raise our profile in.