Highlighting the Gender Gap on Music Streaming Platforms

It’s no secret that the music industry is still facing a lack of female representation. According to PRS, of all songwriters and composers who received a royalty in 2020, only 16.7% were women. A strong indication that many women are still struggling to get their music heard. This underrepresentation is present across the industry, whether it’s songwriting, record labels or live events. The image below shows the line up from Reading and Leeds 2020:

Reading and Leeds line up 2020 gender gap

The line up shows only 20 women (including women in bands, non-binary and trans women) with only three of them on the main stage. A survey conducted by Pitchfork in 2018 showed that as a whole, women make up less than 20% of your average line up. 

At Blokur we recently released our 2020 Songwriters Review which shines a light on the songwriters behind the top-charting songs of 2020. The report includes stories and profiles about the songwriters and trends driving music listening in 2020, but also takes a closer look at the representation of female songwriters across different streaming platforms.

Across all streaming platforms, only 15% of the top 100 songwriters are women. Dr Stacy L. Smith assessed a sample pool of 633 popular songs in her 2019 study ‘Inclusion in the Recording Studio’. The results show that just 43% of songs had a female contributor compared to 99% with a male contributor, confirming the current issue with female representation in the music industry.

If we look more closely at female representation on specific streaming platforms, we can see that the number of female songwriters remains low. On Spotify in 2020, just 14% of Spotify’s top 100 songwriters were women. This is consistent with figures from previous years showing that there has been little to no improvement in terms of female representation, with 11.6% in 2018 and 14.4% in 2019. This gender gap could be linked to the male domination of Spotify’s leading genres which include pop and rap, with rap music being overwhelmingly male-dominated. 

gender gap Spotify

If we head over to Apple Music the scenario is pretty much the same. Although there are three women with songs featured on Apple Music’s top ten songs list of 2020, only 14% of the top 100 songwriters are women and within the top 20, there are no female non-artist songwriters. Rap dominates again as a genre, but despite this, there’s only two female rappers amongst the top 100 songwriters (Doja Cat and Megan Thee Stallion).

gender gap Apple Music

Amazon Music offers more promise even though of the top 100 songs for Amazon Music in 2020, 32% fall under country music, (the platform’s most popular music genre) which is a very male-dominated genre given its traditional roots which often express a male narrative. Despite this, the percentage of female songwriters within the top 100 songwriters is higher than Spotify and Apple at 17%.

gender gap Amazon Music

Out of the main streaming platforms, YouTube had the highest percentage of female songwriters at 18%. This is most likely due to YouTube’s more diverse user base which can perhaps be put down to the dominance of Google’s search engine. Outside of China and Russia, Google frequently reaches 80% or even 90% market share in major music markets, including 96% in Brazil and 97% in India. 

Even though the figure is higher than the other platforms, it is still a shockingly low number which shows that female songwriters barely make up one-fifth of the top 100 songwriters.

gender gap YouTube Music

The Good News

Although there is still a long way to go for female representation in the music industry, it should be noted that positive change is happening. PRS for Music saw a 60% year-on-year increase in women joining the organisation as composers and professional songwriters up from 1,097 in 2018, to 1,755 in 2019. In 2020 it was also announced that it was the first time the Mercury Prize nominations were lead by female artists and the first time that the ‘Best Rock Performance’ category at the GRAMMYs was all female-fronted. This is good news given that out of a total of 899 individuals who were nominated for a Grammy Award between 2013 and 2018, 90.7% of those were male and only 9.3% were female according to a study carried out by the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.

Finally, we should celebrate the successes of some of the amazing women who are mentioned in the top charts! One of just 17 women to feature in our index of top Amazon songwriters is Kristen Anderson-Lopez, one of the masterminds behind Academy Award winners Let It Go from Frozen and Remember Me from Coco. Kristen’s 50:50 split alongside her husband Robert Lopez on Frozen’s Let It Go and Frozen II’s Into The Unknown, earns her equal 12th spot on our Amazon top writers list for 2020, with her songs touching the hearts of many Disney fans.

gender gap Kristen Anderson-Lopez

Original photo courtesy of Debby Wong, Shutterstock

Nomcebo Zikode, a songwriter hailing from KwaZulu-Natal province in South Africa, is also an inspirational female songwriter who is featured at number 51 on the 2020 YouTube list, having written the lyrics on Master KG’s massive hit Jerusalema. The song, performed in isiZulu, became a viral success thanks to inspiring a global dance challenge. The song went on to chart in the top five in France, Belgium, Switzerland, Netherlands and Hungary.

It should also be celebrated that the top songwriter of 2020 is female! As seen in our 2020 Songwriters Review, Toni Watson of Tones and I took the title of top songwriter of 2020 across streaming platforms, having written 100% of her hit single Dance Monkey. This is a great win for female representation in the music industry and will hopefully help pave the way for greater equality. 

Tones and I - Blokur 2020 top songwriter

Interested in diving deeper into these facts and seeing a complete breakdown of songwriting in 2020? Download Blokur’s 2020 Songwriters Review now