Do we prefer male musicians?

Thu 14th Jul, 2011 in Local News

AIR (Australian Independent Record Labels Association) have conducted a small study into the percentage of male vs female artists being played on Australian radio, and the results are quite telling.

To complete the study, AIR sourced ‘spin’ reports from every commercial radio network in Australia, triple j, ABC local, Radio National as well as a handful of the highest profile community and regional stations.

A song was defined as either male or female based on the lead vocalist’s gender; so a band such as Sneaky Sound System would be defined as female despite it containing two males and one female and vice versa, where females where just playing an instrument within a band lead by a male, the song would be defined as male.

The results found that of the 2000 most played songs on Australia radio during June 2011 1,634 (81.7%) had male vocals, while 366 (18.3%) featured females on lead vocal. When the study broke this down into the actual number of spins these songs received of the total 348,329 plays that tool place, 265043 (76.1%) were male and 83191 were female (23.9%).

Speaking with Mess + Noise about the report AIR general manager Nick O’Byrne said “After we published the blog I spoke to a representative of APRA who said their songwriter membership is approximately 80 percent male and 20 percent female, so it could just be that airplay is a representation of participation within the industry. The question then becomes, why are there not more female participants in the industry? Is it because they don’t have female role-models on the radio? It seems to me that there’s a feedback loop here that works against female artists.”

With so many up-and-coming female musicians in Australia today do you think that this skew is reflective of the music industry today, or do you think it is an anomaly? Is the gender discussion in music still a relevant one, or do you think that it is no longer an issue?