Rolling Stone: A new study by the USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative finds that over the last six years, women have been vastly underrepresented in popular music. The study analyzed 600 songs from the Billboard Hot 100 released between 2012 and 2017 and found only 22 percent of those songs were by female artists. Even fewer songs – 12 percent – had female songwriting credits. The culprit, the findings suggest, may be in the recording studio.
4 comments:
This is a very intriguing issue to think about. I listen to mostly female artists a.) because I find their music to be less alienating and b.) because I want to support the art of female artists. In my head that means that I am supporting women and females. But ultimately there are men doing the actual recording, there are men mixing, there are men writing songs that are deeply female in nature.
This article calls me back to the article about women behind the scenes in movies. The disparity between men and women in behind the scenes work is incredibly discouraging. Representation in all job fields is incredibly important. If a little kid doesn't have the opportunity to see someone like themselves working in a certain field, they won't feel like they can be a part of that field.
Musical engineering is something that is really intriguing and awesome and I hope that more and more women and other marginalized groups start to pursue that career.
I, like Joss, listen to lyrical music mostly by women and sung by women because I can identify more with the thoughts, feelings, and experiences of women. I don't like listening to country music for many reasons, but chiefly because country music is sung mostly by white men, about white, heterosexual problems. I read a Buzzfeed article, an interview with Hayley Kiyoko, that called her "Lesbian Jesus." I think she has gained such a cult following so quickly because we (the Asian American woman, the wlw queer community) have had no representation in popular music up until Kiyoko. I definitely agree that that increase in intersectional diversity needs to increase behind the microphone as well. The only way to tell diverse stories in all medium is if diverse people tell them. When I was younger, and was super into music and music production, I definitely toyed with the idea of going into music production. I was put off by the seemingly toxic masculine atmosphere of music production, and that definitely represents a shift that needs to happen inside the music production community and to others outside the community looking in.
While gender disparity in music is a extremely concerning issue, I can’t say I was entirely surprised when reading some of the statistics the article provided. The lack of female presence in the recording studio reminds me of the issues of lack of females in high positions of power as bosses or CEOs in the corporate world. While we have made great progress in recent years concerning many disparities that feminism addresses, there are still gaps in our consciousnesses about women holding powerful positions in creative industries and otherwise. Although the article didn’t provide any information on this, I was curious while reading about the disparities between white female artists and female artists of color, and whether there is a significant gap in the amount of producer seats they occupy in the industry. Even though there are some extremely powerful and influential musicians of color populating the top charts in this current age that the article cited (Nicki Minaj, Beyonce, Rihanna) I wouldn’t be surprised if women of color faced even greater disadvantages in the recording studio than white women.
This is an interesting piece to read, and a highly complex topic to address. The statistics given in this article were another disappointing case of blatant inequality that has gone overlooked for too long, especially because it is something that isn’t directly in the eye of the public. When I think about different artistic ventures, I hope that all the people who have a hand in it try to follow the same values that the final piece present, and there are so many “feminist” artists out there, who truly do not practice what they preach. Those women have a foot in the door, and they make minimal efforts to push for more women reaching in to all aspects of an industry. The disparity between women and men behind the scenes is wildly discouraging, and it is something that we need to, as a group of socially and professionally aware people, need to actively take part in the rectifying of that mistake.
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