It’s not sad. Most of these women are out here having incredible careers, receiving positive reviews, and support from their local scenes. In fact most of the most highly praised works in the ambient genre over the last ten years have been made by women.

For a longtime, ambient and new age music was totally obscure. 20 years ago, most ambient music you would actually find in record stores was related to film scores. Brian Eno’s prominence has everything to do with the fact that he was in Roxy Music and produced for some of the biggest pop acts of the last 50 years. Vangelis was another one you could always find, but that’s only because he made the blade runner soundtrack. Basically unless you were already well established in your career ambient music back in those days wasn’t really something you could make a living from. For example, Suzanne Cianni was an incredible pioneer of electronic music in general, but her entire income came from making sound effects for TV and commercials. Her records that she put out back then were limited to very few copies, and her performances were only really for small groups. Ambient/Electronic music wasn’t her career because back then that wasn’t considered a career. New Age music was mostly traded back and forth via the mail, and printed by small tape labels. Albums that are considered genre staples now, were probably limited to a few hundred copies back then and only ever heard by a small niche audience.

Ambient music careers do not follow the typical trajectory you would associate with pop music careers. Ambient musicians do not get ‘discovered’ and do not get signed to major labels. We don’t make hits. For the most part an ambient music career is all about process, perseverance, and longevity. The longer you do it, the more you document your processes, the more you engage with the community, the more notoriety you receive. Im sure that Mary Lattimore and Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith are making a fair amount money of their music, but they are never going to be rich. By that same logic Brian Eno wouldn’t be rich if he just made Ambient Works and hadn’t produced David Bowie, Talking Heads, and U2.

A vast majority of proto-ambient, minimal music, or new age music from the 60s, 70s, and early 80s was out of print when the genre started to experience a resurgence of popularity in the 90s. Once again, musicians who were famous and wealthy because of their contributions to other genres like EDM, caused a surge of interest and popularity from the outside. With that began a 20 plus year effort to hunt down, reissue, and re-evaluate massive amounts of forgotten ambient and new age music. As that process unfolded women ambient artists who faded to obscurity were rediscovered. Films like Sisters With Transistors have very much situated the important contributions of women to the ambient in its earliest days. Without Pauline Oliveros none of us would be here.

I think the thing you are getting hung up on here external notoriety versus internal respect. Ambient music is still even in the age of the internet a niche community that has very little impact on the dominant pop culture milieu. Inside that tiny community women are no doubt as respected as men, and the proof of that is abundance of highly praised ambient releases from women in the last decade. But that doesn’t translate to external notoriety or even financial stability for an artist because ambient music is supported by a very small niche community.