The world seems to be celebrating the much-hyped International Women’s Day, except for the women in the music fraternity, where their voices are mostly muted. When it comes to the music industry, the population is much more diverse in terms of race and ethnicity. However, according to the latest reports, women as songwriters and producers are accountable for only a small portion of the most popular songs being released every year. Additionally, they have not made any significant gains in the past nine years even if the industry has expanded in various ways and continues to do so.
The report has been released to coincide with International Women’s Day and also comes in just a couple of days before the Grammy Awards, which is supposedly the biggest night of the year. Even though the awards have made significant progression over the years, but the record says otherwise. The prestigious Grammy Awards have failed to showcase diversity in the nomination field. The female artists have made to just 22% of the top 100 songs being released between the year 2012 and 2020, and an even smaller proportion serves as the writers and the producers. Moreover, a study from 2012-2019, conducted amongst 800 top songs has found that less than 23% of the artists and less than 2% of them are producers.
As per this year’s study adhering to the fourth annual report from the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, which received funding from Spotify for the concerned research, the Grammy’s biggest categories includes the Record of the Year, the Song of the Year, the Album of the Year, Best New Artist, and Producer of the Year have been reviewed. Even though the count f women nominees are marching upwards, the 9-year peak showcased only 28.1% of the total nominees, and most recently as in 2017 was merely 6.4%.
The other major categories include the divide between women solo artists that accounts for 31% and women in bands, which accounts for 7.3%, and between all the women in total that accounts for about 21.6%, and women songwriters with 12.6%.
As per the genre division, the female artists were the most prominent in pop with 32%, while the hip-hop and rap genres encountered only 12.3%, being performed by women. A place where the all-male writing teams were about 57.3%, the women writing credits were handed to less than 1% of the songs.
The artists if colors fared much better and made up to 45.4% of the total performers in the top n800 songs but the report, however, determined that the women of color are almost invisible as producers, with just 8 of the total 1093 producing credits.
The data showcases that women account for only 13% of the songwriting credits, a figure that has certainly increased over the years but 57% of the songs that have been measured by the study show no female writers, and only less than 1% had female writers. Speaking on the wide gap, Dr. Katherine Pieper, Marc Choueiti, Karla Hernandez, and Kevin Yao stated that each song on the popular charts represents an opportunity to include women and for artists who are looking to work on new music, they must consider working with women in both producing and songwriting roles. The process might seem easier with prior collaborators but the whole procedure of discovering new talents and new partners would thereby open up the innovation potential.
On a slightly positive note, 59% of the artists on the 2020 Billboard Hot 100 Year-End Charts emerged from the under-represented ethnic/ racial groups and 41% were white that reportedly marked a nine-year high for the under-represented artists and also for the fourth co9nsecutive year where the percentage of the under-represented artists increased deliberately.
The main motive behind the research was to update the Inclusion in the Recording Studio study. The study also assessed the inclusion of the nominees at the Grammy’s focusing on the time frame 2012 to 2019. Previously the genre-based percentage had been stated and now we turn to the performer type percentage.
Much similar to the previous data, less than a third of all the solo artists who performed were women, 69% were men. 2019 was nothing exclusive but rather saw a decrease in the percentage count with women accounting for only 35.8% and even fewer members of duos, 5.8%, or bands, 7.3%. For the duos category, only 1-2 women were being credited across the span of five years.
Overall, the 8-year high was achieved back in 2016 when 22.9% or almost 11 women were being credited as band members.
Back in 2018 when the study result was released just before the 60th Grammy Awards, it worked as a backdrop for what reportedly turned into#GrammySoMale protest campaign on the social media platform. The male winners count dramatically over-shined the females, and especially in the prime TV portion of the prestigious ceremony. There was just one single female musician, a new artist winner named Alessia Cara who was represented with a Grammy on the camera that particular year.
The incident also fueled controversy over the Recording Academy’s then-President and Chief Executive Neil Portnow’s comments backstage, when after the awards it was time for the women to step up to achieve clarity with the men.
Selena Gomez, who was a part of the task force, stated that it was almost a year ago when she had joined the initiative from the Recording Academy’s Diversity and Inclusion Task Force to create opportunities for the female artist in the industry.
Now, looking more broadly at the recordings that have been fared as the best on the Billboard Hot 100, the numbers become significantly unbalanced as we move forward. Last year it was seen that only 14.4% of the total 3874 songwriters who were responsible for the most popular 800 songs over the study’s eight-year span were women, a statistical count that insignificantly flipped over the eight-year average of 12.5%. This is the figure that has remained almost static over the years; with 11% of the songwriters in 2012 who crafted the top 100 songs that year were women.
Dr. Stacy Smith noted that eleven men were responsible for writing about 23% of the songs that appeared and those eleven men were setting the norms for the lyrics in the 800 most popular songs. To truly understand the perspectives of people from a variety of diversified backgrounds, it is crucially important to get artists to bring new voices to the forefront.
On that note, there has been a significant upward trend for the female songwriters of colors where a linear trend has emerged that depicts a steady increase of the count of the female songwriters coming from the un-represented ethnic/ racial groups. The overall percentage for the white women songwriters varied slightly over those eight years but it, however, remained relatively steady in the low 30% amongst the total female songwriters.
The clear disparity in the world of record production is much overwhelming with 5% of 2019’s top n11 recordings being produced by a woman; the eight-year average is 2.6% women to 97.4% men.
Smith added that the music industry has more or less, virtually almost erased the female producers’ particularly the women of color, from the most popular charts. It is time that the industry must expand its commitment towards all genders to represent the voices and the talent of women in all aspects of the music business. She added that it is essential to ensure that women from all backgrounds are being hired and considered throughout the music industry.