Despite her prowess behind a board, electronic artist PinkPantheress admits it took her a long time to give herself credit as a producer.
While accepting the Producer of the Year honor at the 2024 Billboard Women in Music Awards on Wednesday (March 6) in Inglewood, Calif., the 22-year-old artist shared that she wrote and sang over recognizable beats as an anonymous artist before she started adding her own touches and finally realized she was doing the work of producing her own music.
“Only as my music started to develop did I think of adding my own drums, my own keys, until I was making some beats from scratch,” PinkPantheress said. “That’s when I finally felt comfortable calling myself a producer.”
PinkPantheress was visibly nervous as an enthusiastic crowd cheered her on. She received the accolade from singer and actress Coco Jones at the YouTube Theater, revealing at the start of her speech that “I never thought I’d be recognized as a producer.”
She began her speech by stating she wanted to mention her roots as a producer and explained, “I was at university in a dorm room – oh my heart’s beating really quickly – when I decided there was no way graduating university was going to make me happy in the long run. But I was simultaneously too shy to admit that I wanted to be a musician. Because of this, I had to make music in private.”
With her first mixtape released in 2021 and her debut studio album in 2023, PinkPantheress has already made a name for herself in those few years since attending university, picking up only the second producer of the year award at this year’s ceremony. The inaugural producer of the year award went to Rosalia – who PinkPantheress called “my queen” — in 2023. The English artist was honored in the March 2 issue of Billboard for her production work on her 2023 debut album Heaven Knows, as well as early viral single “Pain” and her 2023 hit “Boy’s a Liar, Pt. 2” with Ice Spice.
“As a woman of color in electronic music, specifically two step and drum and bass,” PinkPantheress said from the stage, “it has taken a lot in the genre to be recognized on a wider scale. A lot of people didn’t expect me to look the way I did, making the music I was making. Even now, people don’t want to take my music seriously, but I am happy that I have the opportunity to be recognized in this specific field by the Billboard Women in Music Awards.”
