1/ How many women among artists?
To be able to count female singers, musicians, producers or songwriters, it is required to have gender specific data describing them. However, here’s the first roadblock — there is little public gender-differentiated metadata describing artists. Most data providers don’t have this kind of information, and the most comprehensive dataset I found so far is the Musicbrainz database.
Gender is only known for about half of individual artists of the Musicbrainz database. Among those with known gender, women represent only 11.6% of “non-group” artists (still that’s 141,318 people). Among songwriters, PRS members in the UK are 16% women, SACEM members in France are 17% women (2018 figures). The gender divide across all regions is roughly 30% female to 70% male with an optimistic outlook.
2/ How many female artists make it in popular music?
The USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative examined the prevalence of women among the top 800 popular songs from 2012 until 2019. Those results are consistent with other studies I could find, and with my own research from Soundcharts: female artists account for about 20% of the top charts
3/ Are streaming platforms male-dominated? The French Hip Hop case
Digger deeper for France (my beloved country) where urban music tops the charts, ratios tend to be worse. Early March this year, only 9% of the top streaming charts were female on Deezer, Spotify and Youtube. The first female I could find in the rankings was Tones & I at the 28th rank on Spotify. The week I looked was indeed a pretty bad week for female music, and hopefully it’s not necessarily the case all year round.
Does it mean that streaming charts are male streaming charts? Why would streaming charts skew towards “gender-imbalaced” artists?
There are many possible explanations there, and the truth probably lies in a combination of the following:
- Subscribers of streaming services are more numerously male than female. Spotify has 43% female listeners for instance.
- French rappers have their music played on repeat more than any other genre.
- Streaming charts can be influenced by plays that are not properly qualified. (e.g. fake plays by bots, or social accounts connected that are male by default)
Interestingly enough, radio airplay doesn’t show as much imbalance. That same week, the Top 100 French Airplay Charts were featuring 35% female artists. In the US too, rap radio is more supportive of female rappers. Being 100% curated, traditional radio has an opportunity to be ahead of the curve and super-serve a female audience that streaming has not yet grasped.
4/ Do men and women consume music differently?
In a nutshell, yes, streaming statistics from Deezer and Spotify show that listening habits differ between males and females. More particularly, women tend to listen to more female-artists on average. On Spotify, female listeners stream 30.5% from female or mixed-gender artists, while male listeners stream 17.2% from female or mixed-gender artists.
Back to French hip hop as an example, Deezer published the gender balance for the 200 biggest hip hop artists of 2018.
5/ Are men more “passionate” about music?
Now let’s look at how much men and women listen to music. To avoid as much bias as possible, I first looked for Youtube numbers, since the platform has the biggest music audience in the world and allows active streams for free.
6/ Why so few women pursuing music careers?
Stacy Smith, one of the USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative leaders, hints at social conditioning:
“Women are shut out of two crucial creative roles in the music industry (…) What the experiences of women reveal is that the biggest barrier they face is the way the music industry thinks about women. The perception of women is highly stereotypical, sexualized, and without skill. Until those core beliefs are altered, women will continue to face a roadblock as they navigate their careers.”
Stacy Smith
During the Music & Gender panel, Claire Morel from Shesaid.so France pointed out as well how women often have to fit stereotypes: the fragile woman singer, the charismatic rock star, the inspiring muse, the woman-child, the hypersexual rapper, and so on. In the 90s, each member of the Spice Girls would illustrate one of these feminine stereotypes. There is little space for a woman who is an artist to just be an artist. Younger female artists who don’t fit these stereotypes are more likely to give up on their music career because they feel less legitimate.
“The male artist, in our image of him, does everything we are told not to do: He is violent and selfish. He neglects or betrays his friends and family. He smokes, drinks, scandalizes, indulges his lusts and in every way bites the hand that feeds him, all to be unmasked at the end as a peerless genius. Equally, he does the things we are least able or least willing to do: to work without expectation of a reward, to dispense with material comfort and to maintain an absolute indifference to what other people think of him. For he is the intimate associate of beauty and the world’s truth, dispenser of that rare substance — art — by which we are capable of feeling our lives to be elevated. Is there a female equivalent to this image?”