So-called alternative musicians pride themselves on being more enlightened than their rock counterparts, but in my years of writing about them, I have found no end of ‘beta male misogyny’

I wish I could say I was surprised by the New York Times report detailing allegations that the singer-songwriter Ryan Adams offered to mentor young women, before pursuing them sexually and turning nasty after they turned him down. His ex-wife, the musician and actor Mandy Moore, described him as “psychologically abusive”. When the musician Phoebe Bridgers began a relationship with Adams after he offered to mentor her – at the time he was 40, she 20 – she said he quickly became emotionally abusive and manipulative, “threatening suicide” if she didn’t reply to his texts immediately.

Stories like these are eminently familiar to me and many other women who work in the music industry. Surely to men, too, although if they talk about them, it’s rarely to us women. The industry has been slower to reckon with its abusers post-#MeToo than other art forms, partly because it is built on a generally permissive culture of excess and blurred lines between work and leisure – but also because the myth of the unbridled male genius remains at its core. The male genius is the norm from which everyone else deviates. He sells records, concert tickets and magazines. And because he resembles most of the men who run the industry, few of them are in any hurry to act when he is accused of heinous behaviour, lest their own actions come into question.