📣🚨 ACT NOW | Spotify, Country Music, and the Omission of Women Artists
photo credit: Tim Mossholder, via Unsplash
Wow! This tweet from Celia V. Harquail really led us down a rabbit hole of gender imbalance in music streaming services, especially as it relates to the country music industry.
We discovered that there are already so many poignant and insightful pieces about Spotify, country music, and gender representation, that we wanted to give our fellow GenderAvengers some love and share their eye-opening work with you here.
#GAReads: Music Executives Keep Making Excuses for Why Women Don't Succeed on Country Radio
Discover Weakly: a piece from writer Liz Pelly on Spotify and Smirnoff’s brand partnership, The Smirnoff Equalizer, an algorithmic discovery tool that was supposed to analyze users’ listening habits and “equalize” the gender ratio of their listening experience. Spoiler alert, it didn’t work.
New Study: Gender Representation on Country Music Radio: written by musicologist, digital humanist and country music scholar Jada E. Watson
#GAReads: Music's biggest stars are women. Music festivals would make you think otherwise
Martina McBride on Spotify’s Female Representation: ‘I’m Frustrated for My Sisters’: a Rolling Stone piece on Martina McBride’s recent experience with creating a country music playlist on Spotify
Reflecting on Spotify’s Recommender System: written by Jada E. Watson, spurred by Martina McBride’s social media post about Spotify’s gender imbalance problem
Forgotten Women of Country Music Twitter Thread: started by ethno/musicology PhD candidate and public folklorist Sophia Enriquez after watching Ken Burns’ country music documentary
Add these to your reading list and take to social media to demand that Spotify, popular music stations, and everyone else allow these women the opportunity to have their music, and voices, heard.
📣🚨 It’s time for @Spotify to play music by women as often as music by men because @lizpelly, @data_jada and @sophiamenriquez have the data to prove it’s not happening. cc: @cvharquail #GenderAvenger https://www.genderavenger.com/blog/act-now-spotify-country-music-women-artists