Only 2 percent of the producers of the 100 best songs last year were women, compared to 5 percent last year. Minority women were almost completely excluded from this category: of the 1,291 producer credits for the most popular songs in a 600 song subgroup since 2012, only nine were for women in color.
The report shows that there has been no significant improvement for female creators at the forefront of the music industry in nearly a decade.
The charts are far more diverse when it comes to the ethnic background of performing artists. Last year, 59 percent of the artists behind the top 100 songs were People with Color – a likely expression of the dominance of hip-hop and the way streaming has pushed the globalization of the pop charts. This ratio has generally increased for both men and women over the course of the Annenberg study, although the upward trend is more pronounced for men.
In another announcement, PRS for Music, a major UK copyright society, said 81.7 percent of its members were men, although the pace at which women have joined the organization, which handles licenses and royalties on songs, has increased.
Dr. Data collected by Smith and her colleagues, including Katherine Pieper, Marc Choueiti, Karla Hernandez, and Kevin Yao, are publicly available. But their first study in 2018 – in the middle of the #MeToo movement and after Dr. Smith’s high-profile criticism of Hollywood diversity – still shocked the music industry.
Since then, a number of initiatives have been taken to address underlying issues in the industry, including She Is the Music, a group co-founded by Alicia Keys to promote women through efforts such as mentoring and an employment database. In 2019, the Recording Academy asked the organization behind the Grammys, record labels, producers, and artists to pledge to consider at least two candidates for production and engineering careers. Since then, at least 650 people and companies have registered.
Dr. Smith praised such efforts but said they are not enough.
“The industry needs to move from concern about the numbers,” she said, “to real and concrete steps to remove bias and provide access to the positions and spaces for the talented women who are already in the industry. which remain closed to you. In this case, the numbers reflect this change. “
