As of yesterday (July 28), Maren Morris' single "GIRL" officially became the #1 song on country radio, per Mediabase. This is not only significant because it jumped three spots from the #4 position it occupied last week, but more importantly because Morris is a woman. Unless you’re new to the genre, you are aware that country radio is plagued by an overwhelming lack of women, especially at the top of the charts. This is a characteristic of not only country radio, but the genre as a whole. Women are time and time beat out by their male counterparts in the big categories at annual award shows, consistently draw smaller crowds and sell less albums and singles.
Typically, lack of radio play and opportunities from established labels (which would help all of these problems), is identified as the root issue for the gender inequality. This has been chronicled countless times throughout the industry and is no longer a secret. This report from April of this year details the vast lacking of women on country airwaves, culminating in a conclusion that on country radio you will hear 4.4 male artists for every song by a female artist. Miranda Lambert bluntly summed up the situation after she was featured with Jason Aldean on a track that went number one: “I had to sing with someone with a penis to get a number one” (Yahr, 2018). No matter what report you look at or individual you talk to, the gap between men and women in the genre is massive. And if you ask me, very embarrassing.
Nevertheless, Maren Morris was able to score her second solo #1 hit this week while simultaneously debuting "Redesigning Women" with her newly formed supergroup, The Highwomen. This group consists of Brandi Carlile, Amanda Shires, Natalie Hemby and is bolstered by Morris' star-power. Their initial performances together, including a recent set with country legend Dolly Parton, has been the talk of the industry. One of the reasons for The Highwomen's quick start out of the gate is the attention that Morris brings to the table. She is currently one of only a few women in country music to see consistent success, but as you will see later in this piece, this almost didn't happen.
Regardless of what Morris, Miranda Lambert, Carrie Underwood, Kacey Musgraves and Kelsea Ballerini are currently achieving, the women of country are still largely overshadowed by their male counterparts. Worse yet, the amount of opportunities for up and coming country women is drastically smaller than aspiring male artists. If the genre's gender gap is ever to be fixed in the future, young female artists need to gain traction in order to see future results. This is arguably country music’s biggest issue at the moment and needs to be addressed immediately.
I’ve always believed that when identifying a problem, one should strive to suggest a realistic solution to address it. In this case, I will discuss two. First, female country artists should optimize their social media presence. In my previous article I described how many of the best-selling artists of 2019 have very successful social media accounts which center around fan interaction. Unfortunately for women in the genre, the reality of the situation is that they are at a disadvantage to begin with. Therefore, they should do everything possible in their power to grow their fan base, and social media interaction can help with this directly. The next step to close the gender gap is not something for the female artists themselves to do, but instead is a change that needs to be made by the industry’s newest consumption tool.
The Rise of Streaming Services
As I have previously mentioned on this page, in the past few years streaming has taken over the industry as the go-to method for music procurement by consumers. Spotify, Apple Music and Amazon are the main choices, but more and more services are becoming available as growth continues. The streaming model is vastly superior for consumers and the numbers visibly reflect this. Shown below is a breakdown from 2018 which quantifies the industry’s growth by quarter since the beginning of 2016, as well as the market share held by each individual company.
As you can see, streaming’s growth is trending upwards at a very consistent rate. Given this report only goes through the second quarter of 2018, music subscribers should be approaching 300 million by now (mid 2019) with revenues increasing respectively. This is a massive number of individuals who turn to Spotify and Apple Music (among others) for all of their music needs. This not only includes music listening and collection, but also the act of new music discovery. This third feature is the most influential and the key to using these platforms to close the gender gap in country music.
Female Representation in Streaming Country Playlists
On platforms such as Spotify and Apple Music, there are a plethora of ways to access music. Specific artists and tracks can be played, radio stations with unlimited skips can be created based on a chosen genre, artist or song, or music can be played from previously created playlists. Playlists seem to be the most commonly played entity on streaming services and come from a variety of sources. Of course, people create their own playlists and can make these publicly available for others to access. A public playlist can be followed by any user which will add that playlist to the user’s library for quick and easy access. However, it turns out that the most influential playlists, measured by number of followers, are the hundreds of playlists created by the platforms themselves. They are intuitively found through the browsing features of streaming services, and every genre has dozens of various playlists for every mood and occasion. As is consistent with the genre, women are enormously underrepresented in these playlists. Saving Country Music discussed this in an article last January which focused on Spotify’s four biggest country playlists. This was part of a larger observation that Spotify’s playlists display the same problems as country radio. My analysis is a deeper dive into 25 country playlists from both Spotify and Apple Music, focused specifically on country’s gender gap – and the numbers are not pretty.
As seen above, the 25 playlists from each platform are sorted by percentage of female placement within the individual playlists, with totals summed in the bottom row. Half values reflect mixed-gender groups or mixed-gender song collaborations. The playlists highlighted in yellow are the highest percentages and those which are close to, if not entirely female playlists based on their descriptions.
From a high level overview, these totals are incredibly low. Spotify’s country playlists are just 18.32% female, which means on average you’ll hear close to 5.5 tracks by men before hearing a female voice. Apple Music’s slightly better with a 27.59% female average, equating to an average of 3.6 songs by male artists before hearing a woman. No way around it, these numbers are staggering and speak volumes to the problem.
Taking a closer look at the individual playlists, the female percentages start out promising and then take an aggressive turn downward, especially on Spotify’s platform. Their laudable “Women of Country” playlist is 100% female, but their next highest female percentage is “Wild Country” with just 36.5% female placement. This is an absurd decrease and is better described as a drop off a cliff. Apple Music doesn’t have quite as large a drop, with two of their playlists featuring women at 69% and 41%. However, the next playlist drops to 35% which is right back to the rate seen in Spotify’s mixed gender playlists. Worse yet, if the highlighted female-centric playlists are excluded from the data, the overall female percentages drop to just 23.82% for Apple Music and 14.84% for Spotify. These female centered playlists are obviously great for women to get exposure, but they should not be the only place to find great female country artists. The regular playlists should be much more balanced with gender ratios significantly closer to 50%.
Next, it is necessary to look at the discrepancies between the top and bottom entries of the Spotify table, especially because they publicly disclose playlist follower counts. At the top, excluding the all-female “Women of Country” playlist, “Wild Country”, “Fresh Country” and “Next From Nashville” all hover around female placement rates of about one-third (32-36%). These playlists, based on their descriptions, are meant to showcase emerging artists and those who produce progressive sounds. These numbers are not entirely terrible, but once again would be much closer to a 50% gender balance in an ideal world.
On the other hand, the numbers that are terrible are the playlists at the bottom of this table. These playlists explain why the overall percentages are so low. The bottom four playlists combine for only 1.5 female voices out of 218 songs, which is 0.7%. This is quite frankly unbelievable, as the bottom two playlists, “Tailgate Party” and “Country Kind of Love", don’t feature a single woman in their 54 and 55 song playlists, respectively. While it is egregious enough in itself that Spotify couldn’t find one song by a female artist about love, the real detriment comes with comparing follower counts. The four Spotify playlists listed above with the highest female placement rates (excluding “Women of Country”), combine for just over 1.3 million followers. This aggregate is less than one single playlist, “Chillin’ on a Dirt Road” which has close to 1.8 million followers, but only 1.5 songs by women in a playlist of 54 songs (2.8%). The magnitude of this difference explains the amplification of the gender gap in the genre. With so many people following these unbalanced playlists, the average fan is much more likely to be listening to male artists.
Additionally, the number of followers for Spotify playlists is so top heavy that the five largest playlists account for 71% of the total follower count out of the twenty-five total playlists in the data. These five playlists combine for just 15% female placement and show that the vast majority of Spotify users are following playlists with dismal female representation.
Low Hanging Fruit: Why Streaming Playlists Matter
One might look at this analysis and be tempted to write this off as another harsh reality of country music’s current state. If women don’t get as much airplay on country radio, why would we expect streaming platforms to be any different? The answer to this question is that streaming platforms are fundamentally different than traditional radio, and these differences make them more important to address at the moment. Furthermore, the direction of the industry has rendered streaming the ideal choice for modern consumers, making them even more vital to closing the gender gap in the long run.
In terms of differences, the largest and most obvious is that radio listeners do not have an immediate choice in the content, while streaming customers do. Streaming platforms, as mentioned before, have a multitude of ways to access music. The consumer has immediate access to millions of songs and playlists, but will ultimately choose what they desire to listen to the most. While that is out of the control of the platform, what they present in their playlists will be what is most easily found by the average fan. These playlists, as shown by follower counts, have a huge influence on the new music that people discover. Right now, the country playlists are mostly only benefitting rising male artists with women seeing little exposure. Of course, radio could take the initiative to play more women, but the structure of streaming platforms is much better suited to do so. These unique features of streaming platforms are what make them the low hanging fruit in the fight for gender equality.
Unlike radio, artists do not need the backing of a record label to have their music placed in streaming catalogs. Therefore, their music can be placed on popular curated playlists in order to foster their growth from fan discovery. With women in country often facing difficulty getting a record deal, this could help independent female artists get their start. In fact, this method has already been extremely successful within the genre itself. This is how now Grammy-winning artist and current holder of the #1 song on country radio, Maren Morris’ career got jumpstarted. Her story is a testament to the power the platform holds: “Just from being placed on a playlist, it caught like wildfire. It made all the labels in Nashville say, ‘Who is this girl and what is happening with this song? Spotify really changed the game in that it put an unknown artist’s song on a much bigger platform, with more eyes than country radio was doing at the time” (Hudak, 2019). Maren Morris is now one of the most successful women in country music today, but it is possible that she would have never found this success without Spotify helping her as an emerging artist.
The other advantage streaming platforms hold over radio is that they do not have limits on time or space. While radio has a finite amount of programming over the course of a day, streaming platforms can create unlimited amounts of stations for their users, as well as playlists of unlimited sizes. Furthermore, artists are able to market multiple songs at one time instead of pushing individual songs to radio until they fade out in popularity. There is absolutely no reason why Spotify couldn’t add 55 songs by female artists to their “Country Kind of Love” playlist. This would balance out the gender ratio and give equal opportunities to the women of the genre. Streaming provides the ability to give women ample opportunities for discovery without requiring opportunities be taken away from men. This is a win-win situation that, unlike traditional radio, is unique to streaming platforms because they are not limited by time. These are the capabilities that technology has unlocked and makes streaming platforms the perfect weapon to combat country music’s gender gap.
Moving Forward
Based on every indication, streaming is not going anywhere soon. It will continue to grow its market share in the industry especially as younger generations take over the majority of music consumption. In fact, it is foreseeable that in the near future streaming will actually overtake traditional radio formats in popularity. This is why I believe streaming services such as Spotify and Apple Music are in such a unique position and should leverage this to better the country music genre; starting with simple playlist additions. There are countless female country artists who are tremendously talented but have not been given the opportunities to have these talents heard by the masses. Just as Spotify did for Maren Morris, playlist curators should add music from these aspiring women to their popular playlists to give them the exposure they deserve. This will increase their streams, broaden their reach, lead to record deals, concert bookings and potentially more radio spins.
These companies have created extremely powerful tools for music discovery in which small changes, such as more playlist adds for women, have the potential to make a monumental impact. Spotify and Apple Music have the opportunity as industry leaders to ignite this change by simply diversifying their popular playlists to include more women. There are untold numbers of great female country musicians that warrant their talent be heard, with more moving to Nashville each day. If these companies truly cared about the direction and what is best for country music, they would make this simple change and help catalyze a shrink in the gender gap to accommodate a healthier, more prosperous genre.