Women Who Helped Shape The Music Industry

At Solid Merch, Women’s History Month hits close to home. Our parent company, A to Z Media, was founded and is led by Sarah Robertson, and both A to Z and Solid Merch include women in key leadership roles across the business. We believe that representation in the music industry matters, and that belief shapes everything from who we hire to who we partner with.

It also shapes how we think about our work. Physical media for indie artists—vinyl, CDs, cassettes, the tangible formats that give music a permanent home—has always depended on people willing to build the infrastructure behind it. This month, we’re looking back at five women who did exactly that: label founders, technologists, archivists, and entrepreneurs who understood that music needs more than talent to survive. It needs records, stores, machines, and distribution networks.

Here are five women who built those things.

Estelle Axton (1918–2004)

In 1958, Estelle Axton mortgaged her home to help fund what would become one of the most important record labels in American music history: Stax Records. As co-founder, she brought more than capital, she brought instinct. Estelle opened a record shop at the front of the studio, using real-time customer feedback to help shape the Memphis Sound. If something was selling, she paid attention to why. That instinct helped define the soul genre.

Axton was also a rare voice for racial integration in the Jim Crow South. At a time when separation was enforced by law and custom, she helped create a space where Black and white musicians worked alongside each other, making music that crossed every boundary the world tried to put between them.

Daphne Oram (1925–2003)

Daphne Oram co-founded the BBC Radiophonic Workshop in 1958, helping to lay the foundation for electronic music in Britain. She left within a year — frustrated that the BBC wasn’t moving boldly enough — and set out on her own. What followed was remarkable: she built the Oramics Machine, a device that read hand-drawn shapes on 35mm film strips and converted them into sound.

The idea that you could literally draw music into existence was radical in the early 1960s. The Oramics Machine anticipated the digital audio tools that define music production today, and it did so through a deeply physical process: marks on film, translated into frequencies. For anyone who believes in the power of the tangible, Oram’s work is a meaningful touchstone.

Victoria Hernández (1897–1998)

In 1927, Victoria Hernández opened Almacenes Hernández on Madison Avenue in East Harlem — the first Puerto Rican-owned music store in New York City. She didn’t stop there. That same year, she founded the Hispano record label to document Puerto Rican music that major labels had no interest in recording. She then built the distribution networks necessary to give that music reach.

At a time when Latin music had no commercial infrastructure in the United States, Hernández created one, a store, label, and distribution from the ground up. She understood that music doesn’t sustain itself on talent alone. It needs places to live, formats to travel in, and people willing to do the hard work of getting it to listeners. She did all three.

Frances Densmore (1867–1957)

Starting in 1907, ethnomusicologist Frances Densmore traveled across the United States with a hand-cranked wax-cylinder recorder, capturing more than 2,000 recordings of Native American music. She lugged heavy, fragile equipment into remote areas, understanding that entire musical traditions were at risk of disappearing and that physical media was the only tool available to prevent it.

Her archive remains one of the most significant collections of its kind. Whatever the complexities of her legacy, her work stands as a reminder of something we believe deeply at Solid Merch: that physical media for indie artists and established acts alike isn’t just a manufacturing decision, it’s an act of preservation.

Sylvia Robinson (1936–2011)

Sylvia Robinson didn’t just recognize hip-hop; she made it reproducible. After witnessing the raw energy of a rapper performing live at a Harlem nightclub, she understood that what she was hearing could exist on a record and reach the world. As co-founder of Sugar Hill Records, she assembled the artists, oversaw the production, and in 1979 released “Rapper’s Delight” — the 12-inch single that proved rap wasn’t just a live experience, but a genre.

“Rapper’s Delight” remains the best-selling 12-inch vinyl single of all time. Robinson’s contribution wasn’t just cultural, it was a masterclass in understanding what physical media can do. She took something that existed only in rooms and put it in your hands.

Women Are Still Making History

The women above helped build the music industry’s infrastructure, its labels, stores, archives, technologies, and formats. That work continues today. Women are leading record labels, running pressing plants, producing records, and championing physical media for indie artists at every level of the industry.

At Solid Merch, we’re proud to partner with many of them. Whether it’s a first vinyl pressing for an independent artist or a large-scale CD run for an established label, a significant and growing share of the projects we work on are led by women — and that’s something we celebrate not just in March, but every time we ship a record.

Here’s to the women who built it, and the ones still building.