Country hitmaker Megan Moroney was honored Wednesday at the second annual Sharing the Spotlight awards hosted by She Is The Music, the nonprofit advocacy group for women in the music industry co-founded by Alicia Keys.
“I’m not even gonna play with y’all. I can’t believe Alicia Keys knows who I am,” Moroney said with a laugh as she accepted her Artist Spotlight award, which recognized both her breakout success and the all-female team behind her career, including her manager Hayley Corbett, agent Elisa Vazzan, publicist Jensen Sussman, and tour manager Chelsae Partosan. A platinum-selling singer-songwriter and critical favorite, Moroney previously won the Country Music Association’s New Artist of the Year award in 2024.
“I’m inspired every time I get to be in a room with badass women who change the game every day, who do things their own way, and who don’t take no for an answer,” Moroney said at the packed event in West Hollywood. “I think sometimes we’re taught, subtly or not, that there’s only room for a few women at the top. But music and creating art isn’t a competition for oxygen. I’m positive that when one of us wins, it stretches the ceiling higher for the next girl watching.”
Speaking with Rolling Stone, Keys said she was impressed by Moroney “consciously bringing incredible women into the scene.” The Grammy award winner said she founded She Is The Music with UMPG CEO Jody Gerson, mix engineer Ann Mincieli, and UTA’s co-Head of Music, Sam Kirby Yoh, after seeing a 2018 USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative report that found women remained severely underrepresented in the music industry. The report found that the ratio of male to female producers across 400 popular songs was 47-to-1.
“We saw these statistics coming back, showing there really aren’t enough women in the seats and positions of power. But we were there, so we knew it was possible,” Keys tells Rolling Stone. “We decided to take matters into our own hands and really create the pathways, the opportunities, the sisterhoods, and the power to bring us all together and show each other how to cultivate the possibilities together.”
Sylvia Rhone, the former chairwoman and chief executive of Epic Records, was also honored Wednesday, receiving the Trailblazers Spotlight Award in recognition of her four-decade career championing female executives and artists, including Missy Elliott.
“I’ve worked in this industry since vinyl,” Rhone told the crowd, recalling a time when women were “rarely, if ever, in line for C-suite or even vice presidential roles.” Women were present, she said, “often the most prepared, often the most intuitive,” but they were not “at the head of the table, not always holding the final pen, and certainly not in these numbers.”
Though she described the current moment as “tumultuous — politically, economically, technologically,” Rhone struck an optimistic note. “Creativity adapts,” she said, “and women, especially women, innovate under pressure.” Looking out at the audience, she added, “I’m not anxious about the future of our industry at all. I’m energized by it. Music is in very good hands. So let’s keep opening doors wider than we found them.”