Alpha Female, Kailei Ginman, Launches Female and LGBTQI+ Inclusive Booking Agency
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Alpha Female, Kailei Ginman, Launches Female and LGBTQI+ Inclusive Booking Agency

We love a good female empowerment story, so when we heard about a lone booking agent shaking up the music industry by establishing a female only and LGBTQI+ inclusive agency, we had to find out more! Kailei Ginman is the mastermind behind the new Melbourne-based startup, Alpha Booking Agency, a project born out of frustration, passion and necessity!
With a career spanning 10 years in the music industry, Ginman hit the ground running working in an artist management firm responsible for looking after the likes of Lisa Mitchell, Evermore and Operator Please. She then moved onto a booking agent and promoter role with Platinum One Entertainment, sidestepping into a publicist and radio plugger position with Shake Appeal, jumping across to Araca Australia as their Merchandise Marketing Manager, and finally jetting across to Ministry of Sound as a booking agent.
“It was a male oriented team so being the only female in the team was difficult at times,” Ginman says of her experience at Ministry of Sound and her decision to leave. “I was looking around thinking ‘wow there aren’t a lot of female agents so that’s something that needs to change’, and also seeing some of the stuff that happened to my female talent while I was there as well. Just all kind of issues, even harassment in the clubs from patrons that weren’t taken seriously so I knew I needed to step in and I knew that I needed to create an agency where these things were taken seriously and to try and avoid this from happening.”
“It even got down to a point where I didn’t even know how to sort of speak to males in my emails with my tone,” she continues. “I had some frustrations obviously, being a female and in a very male dominant environment and I just needed to step out and prepare myself for my next adventure.”
That adventure could not have come at a more appropriate time. After 4 weeks of what Ginman described as sitting in bed, eating a packet of chips in her underwear and ‘really doing unemployment’, she was contacted by an old client to check in with her movements and planted the seed of starting an agency.
“They mentioned to me that they had a few artists that they were working with who didn’t feel represented and that kind of catapulted the idea of Alpha coming together,” Ginman explains. “I had thought about starting my own agency previously but this really kind of cemented it so I ended up moving to Melbourne and getting the agency started.”
The music industry has been under the microscope in recent times in the movement for equality and female representation. As organisations, associations, industry representatives and artists alike in Australia are becoming incredibly proactive in pushing towards diverse representation across festival lineups, Alpha wants to spearhead the change in agencies by representing those who feel like they haven’t been heard and celebrating their passions.
“It just seems like the right time. It all was very serendipitous actually on how everything kind of came about and it’s an exciting time to be able to represent people who feel like they haven’t been represented properly before either because of their gender or their sexuality or even their ethnicity,” Ginman says. “Especially a large part of what Alpha is going to do as well is work with charities and hopefully work with government initiatives and associations for women and LGBTQI+, so it’s super important to Alpha as well that we get behind our artists passions and charities.”
The roster is already flourishing with talent including Ayebatonye, Feline, Stara and Rosie Kate and is due to expand in the coming months.
“The Alpha roster is really going to grow and it will also grow outside of just electronic music,” reveals Ginman.
While Alpha is making waves, the move has not come without critics. Many are calling out Ginman for being discriminatory and labelling the move as ‘reverse sexism’.
“People that are calling it reverse sexism on this movement they are pretty much proving why this agency needs to exist! It’s not reverse sexism in the slightest, it’s just representing people who haven’t been represented previously to the best potential and it’s also about opening up that conversation and just starting change in the industry and hopefully to society just in general!”
Ginman hopes to leave a legacy and see more agencies follow her lead in the coming years, to get the ball rolling in starting the equality conversation!
“It’s not even about just changing the industry. It’s about changing socially…It’s utopian, let’s just hope it works!”
Learn more about Alpha Booking Agency at www.alphabookingagency.com
Written by Tammy Walters