Women of Country Music
Listen to country radio for an hour, and you might find one voice lacking: women.
Sure, Maren Morris and Kelsea Ballerini are heating up the charts, and Carrie Underwood is a country music mainstay. But consider the ratio of men to women on country radio, and you’ll find a huge disproportion.
Streaming Isn’t Immune
Take Martina McBride’s Spotify experience.
A few months ago she decided to make a country music playlist, and Spotify started to provide recommendations. It took 14, yes fourteen, refreshes before a female artist appeared in the recommendations.
And (nothing against her) it was Carrie Underwood.
She went further to note that that same week saw new releases from four well known women in country music, and my guess is there were probably at least a handful more releases from other female musicians in the genre.
It wasn’t just her experience either. My country music recommendations on Spotify are guaranteed to be mostly male, unless a group like Lady Antebellum or Sugarland falls in the list. In fact, I just looked at two playlists recommended to me. One has zero women listed, and the other has about 50% of the songs by women.
The caveat?
Those songs are nearly all by just a handful of female artists.
CMA Awards 2019
The Country Music Association made an attempt to tackle this issue during this year’s awards, though I didn’t get to see it. I often do watch the show because I grew up with the genre, but I missed it with too much on my plate this year.
Though I didn’t watch live, I’ve been finding various performance and acceptance speeches across the Internet, and I am impressed that they tried to step their game up a notch to highlight and feature more women.
The opening collaboration was the first step in the right direction (the video is at the end of this post) and the night featured performances by and collaborations with women. Kelsea Ballerini performed beautiful rendition of her new song “Homecoming Queen,” Maren Morris took home Album of the Year, and Kacey Musgraves won female vocalist of the year, among other highlights.
But was it enough? According to an LA Times article, male nominees still outnumbered female nominees (3-1), and the top award for Entertainer of the Year, a field of four men and one woman, went to Garth Brooks.
Play More Female Records
The lack of women on country radio and in award nominations has been a long discussed issue in the industry and the classroom.
How do we get more women to be heard?
They’re out there - just ask singer/songwriter Lauren Lucas, who I interviewed on Episode 20 of the podcast.
Keep talking about up and coming women. Keep sharing their music. Keep requesting them to played at radio. Keep going to their shows.
Let’s get these ladies heard!
Did you watch the CMA Awards this year? What was your take on it?