HER Music
Legacy Fund.
The Donne Foundation advances gender equity in music by repairing the cultural record - returning women's music to the stages, curricula, recordings, and algorithms that shape what the world hears, values, and remembers.
A Founding-Partner Invitation
The Diagnosis
Women write music.Who do we actually hear?
Men Women
A self-reinforcing silence
For centuries, women's music has been systematically excluded from the places that create permanence and legitimacy: education, recordings, concert programming, archives.
And now, the metadata that shapes what gets discovered online - and what AI learns to value - is inheriting the same gap.
The Urgency
AI is learning fromthe same silence.
AI systems can only learn from the data available to them. Right now that data is missing half of humanity's creativity.
AI is training on that incomplete archive, baking today's bias into tomorrow's culture.
The Donne Foundation is building the infrastructure to repair the record - before that window closes.
The Solution
Restore · Record · Embed
A three-movement intervention to return women's music to prominence.
Restore
Identify, recover and champion women's music - from works erased by history to composers creating today.
Record & Perform
Bring works to life through professional recording and live performance - the moments that decide what survives.
Embed
Place works into education, institutional repertoires, platforms and the systems that shape what is discovered next: teacher toolkits, curriculum integration, streaming distribution, metadata tagging, and searchable archive access.
The Trajectory
A ten · three · one horizon
10years
10,000 works restored.
A world in which women's music is not celebrated as an exception - but expected as a standard. 100+ global partnerships across the institutions, platforms and AI systems that define what the world hears.
3years
A repeatable annual cycle.
Restoration, recording and performance running on an annual rhythm - with partner adoption and a diversified funding base anchored by multi-year supporters.
1year
One flagship cycle, delivered.
At least one full cycle complete; seed funding secured; visibility converted into partner adoption and durable infrastructure.
Why Donne
The global voice for women in music
Donne Foundation at a glance.
The Donne Foundation holds what no other organisation in this space has built: five consecutive years of proprietary sector data - the only longitudinal analysis of its kind - alongside one of the world's largest open databases of women composers and songwriters, used daily by 3,000 musicians, academics, educators and concert programmers worldwide.
That is proof of demand: the people who decide what gets recorded, taught and performed are already using Donne as their primary resource.
Those partnerships extend into action: the Royal Albert Hall, Apple Music, Abbey Road Institute, and the Open University, alongside the Let HER MUSIC Play© campaign, which mobilised a worldwide community around the performance of women's music.
For press coverage and media features: donne-uk.org/press
3,000/day
Average website daily visitors - musicians, academics, educators and performers worldwide
Open database of women composers & songwriters
5 yrs
The only longitudinal study of its kind in the sector
Recommended by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to filmmakers meeting the Oscars® Inclusion Standards
The Let HER MUSIC Play© campaign - longest acoustic music live stream featuring only women and non-binary composers, demonstrating that demand for women's music exists at global scale.
The bottleneck is not discovery.
It is restoration into circulation through recording, performance, and adoption partnerships
Investment & Ask
A founding partnership underwrites
HER Music Legacy Fund.
£250K — £500K
Over three years. Sized to underwrite the first complete cycle of restoration, recording, performance and educational embedding. The investment that makes everything that follows possible.
Your investment funds · I
Restoration & cataloguing:recovering works that would otherwise remain lost
Your investment funds · II
Recording & performance:the moment a work enters the permanent record
Your investment funds · III
Metadata & digital infrastructure:making women's music findable, forever
Your investment funds · IV
Institutional adoption & partnerships:embedding works into the stages, classrooms and platforms that decide what survives
Will you be
a championfor this work?
This is a structural intervention in the cultural record. What future generations discover, study, perform - and what AI learns to value - begins with decisions made now.
This is one of them.
Help shape
what the futureremembers.
A founding partnership secures
The first complete cycle of restoration, recording, performance and educational embedding - the proof of concept that makes everything replicable.
Long-term institutional adoption - across stages, studios, classrooms and platforms, making women's music the expected standard rather than the celebrated exception.
A correction that cannot be undone - women's music restored to the record, the curriculum, and the algorithm, permanently.
Cultural legacy - your investment shapes what AI systems learn, and therefore what culture remembers.
Watch the TED Talk
Where this work begins
