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In honor of International Women’s Day, USC’s Annenberg Inclusion Initiative has released a study on women in recorded music that leaves little to celebrate.
Female artists struggle to make gains in music, study finds
Lucas Shaw, Bloomberg
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The Spotify logo is displayed on a smartphone on Oct. 7, 2020.Bloomberg photo by Gabby Jones.
Women are songwriters or producers on only a small portion of the most popular songs released each year and have made no significant gains in representation over the past nine years even as the industry grows more diverse in other ways.
That s the finding of a report by Dr. Stacy L. Smith, a University of Southern California professor who studies representation in the entertainment industry. Female artists made just 22% of the top 100 songs released each year between 2012 and 2020, and a far smaller percentage of women served as producers and writers, according to the study released Monday, which was funded by Spotify Technology.
Women fell back in race for inclusion in 2020 pop charts Laura Snapes
The music industry continues to marginalise women, according to the latest instalment of a landmark US survey on representation in pop.
In 2020, women were outnumbered on the US Billboard charts by men at a ratio of 3.9 to 1, according to the USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative’s annual study of the Billboard Hot 100 year-end chart.
Women including Dua Lipa, Maren Morris, Doja Cat and Megan Thee Stallion made up 20.2% of the 173 artists that appeared on the chart in 2020, dropping from 22.5% in 2019 – and a high of 28.1% in 2016.
“It is International Women’s Day everywhere, except for women in music, where women’s voices remain muted,” said Dr Stacy L Smith, who led the survey. “While women of colour comprised almost half of all women artists in the nine years examined, there is more work needed to reach inclusion in this business.”
For Women in Music, Equality Remains Out of Reach
The latest study by the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative at the University of Southern California found that women’s representation in music has not improved in the last decade.
The woman with the most songwriting credits in the latest study by the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative at the University of Southern California was Nicki Minaj, with 19.Credit.Angela Weiss/Agence France-Presse Getty Images
Published March 8, 2021Updated March 9, 2021
Three years ago, an academic tallied up the performers, producers and songwriters behind hit songs, and found that women’s representation fell on a scale between, roughly, poor and abysmal.