Music
Whose music gets heard?
The World's Highest-Paid Musicians Of 2018
Zack O'Malley Greenburg, Forbes Staff
Hollywood & Entertainment Senior Editor, Media & Entertainment:
“There is not, however, much gender balance: Just 6 of the top 30 are women, led by Katy Perry (No. 5, $83 million). One of the hardest-working names in our rankings, she played 80 dates during our scoring period, grossing over $1 million per night. She’s followed closely by Taylor Swift (No. 6, $80 million), who started her Reputation Stadium Tour at the tail end of our 12-month range.”
Dr. Stacy Smith of the Annenberg School for Communications and Journalism at USC has also formed The Music Coalition as part of the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, aimed at “creating diversity and inclusion in the music industry”.
Dr. Smith and her colleagues reach a striking conclusion, backed by solid research and data: “Females are missing in popular music.” As an overview, The Music Coalition finds that just 21.7% of recording artists are women, just 12.3% are songwriters, and an abysmal 2.1% are producers.
How can this be? We all listen to Beyoncé and Rihanna and Katy Perry and Taylor Swift, not to mention Miranda Lambert and Miley Cyrus and Demi Lovato, Christina Aguilera and Ariana Grande. Yet in the top 700 songs since 2012, female artists hover around 20% of the total, dropping to just 17% in 2018. And they are more likely than the boys to be individual artists, rather than part of a band (just 7.5% female) or a duo (just 4.6% female). Overall, this is a ratio of 3.6 male-to-female music artists, forming the backdrop of the music that forms our culture.
Songwriters – the creators of the lyrics that get stuck in our heads – are overwhelmingly male: 88% men to 12% women. And the male songwriters have dramatically more credits each. The top male songwriter has 39 credits in the 700 top songs of the last six years, while the top female has just 18.
And the gender gap is truly dismal in the producer’s role, leading Annenberg to state “Females are pushed aside as producers”: Just 2.1% of music producers are women. That’s a ratio of 47 men to each woman music producer. What songs get made, what artists get promoted? Ask the guys.
And what happens behind the scenes shows up at the awards as well. Nearly 90% of all Grammy nominees from 2013-2019 were male. The categories of Record of the Year and Album of the Year were more than 92% male, while nominees for Producer of the Year were 97% male.
Dr. Smith concludes:
“Women are missing in the music industry.”
See all the charts and graphs, along with the full report, here.
What will it take for women to get into the Power Percentage in the Music Business?