A brand new examine solidifies the assumption that nation radio has lengthy been reluctant to play songs from ladies normally — and virtually by no means performs two ladies artists back-to-back.
The examine, by Jan Diehm of The Pudding and Dr. Jada Watson, is titled They Won’t Play a Lady-O on Country Radio: Examining Back-to-Back Plays by Gender, Race and Sexual Orientation. It pulls from the each day logs of 29 nation radio stations in giant market areas, analyzing 24-hour programming in every month of 2022 to see how typically listeners of these stations may count on to listen to back-to-back songs by ladies, artists of coloration and LGBTQ+ artists. Among the nation radio stations included within the examine have been KKGO (Los Angeles), WUSN (Chicago), KKBQ and KILT (Houston), WKDF (Nashville) and WMZQ (Washington, DC).
The examine discovered that at these stations, songs from ladies nation artists have been performed back-to-back a median of 0.5% of the time. In knowledge that’s in step with SongData’s findings concerning daypart programming, the bulk of these back-to-back performs (46.1%) occurred in overnights (between midnight and 6 a.m.), whereas 19% have been performed throughout night hours (between 7 p.m. and midnight) — time intervals with decrease listenership. In the intro to the examine, an anecdotal pattern is given, noting that if one had tuned into a specific (unnamed) station at 8:35 a.m. on Jan. 7, 2022, it will have taken over 9 hours earlier than listening to two consecutive songs from feminine artists.
“If you listen to this station non-stop from midnight to 11:59 p.m. today, you’d likely only hear three back-to-back songs by women, compared to 245 from men,” the report states.
“We’ve heard for many years that songs by women should not be programmed back-to-back — as we say in the study, it’s been part of industry rhetoric since at least the 1960s and was even written into programming manuals,” Watson tells Billboard by way of electronic mail. “But it’s one of those issues that is spoken about anecdotally and now we have this study to show not just that it’s true, but just how bleak it is for women, BIPOC and LGBTQ+ artists at radio.”
The new report builds upon Watson’s earlier work, together with her March 2021 examine, Redlining in Country Music: Representation within the Country Music Industry (2000-2020), and an up to date model launched earlier this 12 months.
“As a listener, it’s pretty easy to pick up on the bias in country radio when you can spend 20 minutes in your car and go without hearing a single song by a woman, let alone back-to-back songs by women,” Diehm tells Billboard by way of electronic mail. “So, I was expecting the worst, but it was so much worse than that. My hometown station is San Antonio (KCYY-FM), the station we used in the intro of the piece — [and] you know it’s bad when you start to think of a station that plays women back-to-back at 0.99% as one of the ‘better’ stations.”
Diehm added that whereas compiling the examine, she and Watson introduced in statistics professor Sara Stoudt, who ran 1,000 “coin-flip” simulations for every of the stations represented. “Even when accounting for the already low rate of plays for women, 17 of the 29 stations played fewer women’s songs back-to-back than you would expect them to if the plays were left up to chance,” she continues. “Not that I needed convincing, but it proved even further that these were absolutely programming decisions and not something that stations could talk themselves out of. That one-two punch of qualitative stories and quantitative data might just help move the needle.”
Moreover, the bulk of songs from ladies which can be performed back-to-back should not present singles. “Gold catalog” songs (songs which can be a number of years outdated) make up 36.2% of the back-to-back songs performed by ladies, whereas recurrents (songs which have reached their peak on the station’s playlist however are nonetheless half of the station’s programming) account for 43.7%. Meanwhile, present singles from ladies artists accounted for simply 20.1% of the small share of back-to-back airplay for songs carried out by ladies.
The affect of present music from ladies being absent from nation radio creates a dangerous spiral that impacts different areas of ladies artists’ careers. It results in fewer ladies signing to report labels, fewer ladies incomes efficiency alternatives on main excursions, festivals and awards ceremony slots and fewer ladies receiving awards nominations, the examine asserts.
“It creates a culture where women are competing only against other women for an already teeny tiny amount of slots,” Diehm says. “Playing only ‘gold songs’ by women artists also means that you’re freezing them in time, not allowing them to grow or evolve, because heaven forbid we let a woman gain or hold power.”
Songs by ladies of coloration and LGBTQ+ artists have been performed even much less on nation radio — incomes lower than 1% of airplay final 12 months. Songs by feminine artists total earned 11% of final 12 months’s airplay, with 10.97% of that low share of airplay going to white ladies and solely 0.03% to Black and biracial ladies. The examine additional notes that solely six solo Black ladies and one group of Black ladies have ranked on nation radio charts since 1958. Meanwhile, LGBTQIA+ artists acquired simply 0.13% of airplay in 2022.
“The bar for entry is high for new women, BIPOC and LGBTQ+ artists. And then we’re left with this practice in which radio supports one woman at a time — and that duration for which white women are supported is becoming shorter,” Watson says. She provides that from roughly 2005 to 2014, Carrie Underwood, Miranda Lambert and Taylor Swift acquired “sustained” assist from radio and have been answerable for a whopping 83% of the No. 1 songs by ladies throughout that interval — and 55% of No. 1 songs by ladies over the past twenty years in complete.
While the above ladies artists nonetheless obtain airplay (and Swift has transitioned to pop), Watson notes that since 2015, newer ladies artists like Kelsea Ballerini, Maren Morris, Carly Pearce and Lainey Wilson have acquired solely “short periods of support,” including that “the industry only lets one succeed at a time…This is a culture that limits space for white women and then tosses out their music once it’s peaked on the charts. They don’t even open the door to BIPOC women and LGBTQ+ artists.”
The report additionally affords historic perception, displaying how feminine illustration on nation radio (particularly cataloged by Billboard‘s Hot Country Songs chart) rose from 6.5% in 1958 to a peak of 33.1% in 1999 (a time when the chart was based mostly solely on radio airplay). But within the many years that adopted, charting songs by ladies artists plummeted to a low of 11.4% in 2015 (the identical 12 months that radio advisor Keith Hill made his now-infamous feedback that in contrast feminine artists to the “tomatoes” in a male-dominated “salad”). The examine notes that over the previous seven years, the share of charting songs by feminine artists has averaged simply 15%.
Though the Hot Country Songs chart now incorporates knowledge past simply radio airplay, the examine exhibits that the numbers from the early 2000s correlate to Mediabase airplay knowledge, which was used to calculate back-to-back charges of airplay within the examine.
Going ahead, Watson plans to proceed finding out the nation radio format however can be excited by “thinking more broadly about the distribution ecosystem and exploring user engagement with Spotify’s recommender system.” She has additionally launched into finding out the Triple A format, which she notes has “a much different strategy for programming and is a format that has been a major launching pad for new artists of all genres.”
“Country music may be the closest to my heart,” Watson provides, “but examining representation in radio programming and charts of other formats is really important for understanding how these genre systems developed over time and work together within the larger industry ecosystem. Country isn’t the only format with these forms of inequity.”
Billboard has reached out for remark to a quantity of radio chains with nation stations and can replace the story as they reply.
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