Lack of Gender Equality in the Music Industry

The purpose of this work is to analyze the differences between the genders in the music industry and to analyze the lack of equality between them.

Is the music industry improving the balance between men and women in the workplace? First, the music industry has always been very creative and soulful. However, at the same time, it happens to be very provocative, perverted and extremely money focused. In the music industry, as a performer, you do not have an average salary as it is usual to have for ‘normal’ professions. Usually, an artist or a company who want to make a contract with the artist have its own price to offer. That is why payment for musicians is a very intriguing theme. Secondly, the differences between male and female evaluation and recognition of their work have to be studied. What so more, in a third time, the essay will cover the male and female position in the music industry. In fact, there are different work and employment opportunities between these genders. As well, in a fourth time, this essay will cover an observation about music videos and their gender norms. What is usual and what is shocking in our eyes is very different if we watch a man performance or a woman performance. It is all about perspectives.

Payment Differences

First of all, do we have differences between women and men payment in music business? The answer is very categorical: yes. From this point of view, it seems that major labels do not care about equality at all. Researches were made about the salaries of males and females in the music industry and the statistics made by MBW revealed some differences in the UK organizations. It makes us understand what a big contrast there is between men’s and women’s wage: on average, a female working at one of the three British major labels earns 33.8% less than a male (Jones, 2018). What so more, 31% of leadership positions at these three labels are filled up by a woman (Jones, 2018). It means that the problem of lower salaries for women don’t go without less opportunities for women to have a higher position and to earn more. But the major labels are not the only ones to point, small ones are not showing a perfect example either. For instance, the Live Nation’s UK operation in 2018 reported a 46% gender pay gap (Jones, 2018). It means that it is almost half of the salary that male worker would earn. As in music business the ratio between men and women is equivalent, we can count that a female employee should work one year to have the amount of money that a male worker would earn in a six-month period. And the fact is that if we look deeper, it is gets darker. There is a huge confirmed difference of 88% in bonuses between male and female employees. This fact was observed by the concert giants. It is even harder to imagine these numbers as companies are avoiding the fact that women workers are in a comparatively high 41% of leadership positions within its company (Jones, 2018).

Grammy Awards

As everything is linked, in relation with the payment topic, statistics are showing that women’s work become worthless comparing to men’s work in the music industry. In fact, it is seen that it does not matter how hard they work: percentages of men who won awards or were nominated comparing to women are ridiculously different. For example, at the Grammys, for the nominees of the biggest awards - Record of the Year, Album of the Year, Song of the Year, Best New Artist and Producer of the Year - men are vastly overrepresented (Kelley, 2019). Only 10.4 % of those who were nominated between 2013 and 2019 years were women. There was one exceptional category where women had 41.1 %. It was the Best New Artist category. But, still, this percentage is lower than the men’s one, it is not even equal to men winning prices (Kelley, 2019). As well at the Grammy Awards, people can get blind by seeing the great success of some female stars like Beyoncé, Billie Eilish or Adele. The lie about equality could be spread by watching their success. But the biggest part of the awards or even of the nominations goes straight away to male artists. Numbers talk loudly: for the last six Grammy ceremonies, where nominated 899 persons. Out of this amount, just 9.3 % were females and left 90.7 % were male nominees.

Looking forward into the way genders are affected mentally and into the amount of work they have to provide to achieve a similar position in the same industry, there were made researches by interviewing 75 female producers and songwriters (Kelley, 2019). The purpose of this work was to analyze experiences of women in music business. Over 40 % of female respondents admitted that their skills in the music industry or their work was discounted or dismissed by male gender colleagues. Simultaneously, sexualization and stereotyping was faced by 39 % of the female workers. A third admitted that this industry belongs to male representatives and this omnipotent gender is dominating this industry. A quarter encountered that, in the recording studios, they are only few females surrounded by the males (Kelley, 2019).

Moreover, looking into the positions that male and female workers usually take in the music industry, Dr. Stacy L. Smith, who analyzed the top 700 songs on the Billboard Hot 100 from 2012 to 2018, observed some facts. It was called 'Inclusion in the Recording Studio' (Kelley, 2019). The research’s purpose was to study the professions in the industry. How the employable places in the music business are split for males and females? There were three main creative roles that had the biggest attention in this research. The concentration was placed into the female’s position in the industry. It is shown that there is just 12.3 % of female songwriters, 2.1 % of producers and just 21.7 % of artists (Kelley, 2019). Dr. Smith said in a press release: “What the experiences of women reveal is that the biggest barrier they face is the way the music industry thinks about women”. He also said that the way the music industry is looking into women is stereotypical and very sexualized. There are still dominating opinion that females have no required skills for this hard business. Dr. Smith predicts that until these beliefs about women position in society or music industry will not be changed, females will not escape from facing negative answers or roadblock in the way of their music careers (Kelley, 2019). Additionally, talking about songwriting, here females are not facing any exception, and the figures are sadly showing that they are not meeting loudly applauses for their work. 57 % of the songs studied did not credit a woman. Meanwhile, only three tracks (counting as less than 1 %) did not credit a male songwriter.

Employment

Going further to the specific examples, researches shows that disparity is easy to notice in the real-life jobs: today, there are just two female presidents of frontline major labels in the UK. Both of them are in the same company - Universal (Jones, 2018). These numbers are showing the real lack of equality between male and female workers in the music industry.

Moreover, the lack of equality is noticed not just in the pay gaps between genders. Studies that were made by Northwestern University are showing that men signed to record labels more frequently, release more songs than women and are aligned with more collaborators to produce music as well. The authors of the study analyzed four factors in their work: sonic features, genre, record label affiliation and collaboration network. The purpose is to identify the gender of an artist without taking vocal pitch into consideration. Study found that out of the nearly 5,000 record labels in the study’s data set, only a third have ever signed at least one female artist (Samuelson, 2019). These numbers are shocking for our century when we are talking about equality so casually. And here we face this unexplainable statistic between genders in music industry.

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Music Videos

Since the music industry started to build itself, it never stopped growing, it was never forgotten or less important. In all centuries, music played a significant role in people’s lives, with nearly 70 % of people aged 13 and older conscientiously listening to music at least once a day and 90 % of people conscientiously listening to music at least several times a week (Bakula, 2012). Furthermore, 13 % of 11-to 14-year-olds regularly watch music videos, consumption habits that are comparable to those of other television genres such as reality television, talk shows, and news programs (Roberts & Foehr, 2004).

You do not need to be the critic of the music videos to notice that in the majority of the content that are presented on streaming platforms, there is a predominance of sex and love themes. It has a big power in society’s portrait about sexuality and gender. Music videos have exactly this power: to provide substantial ability for examining what role male and female have in the music industry.

When MTV went on cable in 1981, the popularity of music videos exploded. It can be predicted that music relation with the viewing is just going to grow and going to make even more and more influence in the gender distribution as it never been stop in an already 39-years period. It is very important to make differences between genders in music videos because it is shown from statistics that music plays a huge role in people’s everyday lives and especially for young generation. It influences the understanding about men and women position in society. The power that music has is huge, it should not be wasted.

Even todays’ music videos are supporting the idea that young generations and especially females should achieve attractive appearance and seductive body views because this is what takes higher among the most important goals that teenagers are able to achieve.

Findings reflected that women in music videos often are placed in positions of sexual submission to their male counterparts.

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For standing example, we can look at the music videos where male artists are fully dressed with casual clothes and even with a coat, meanwhile females are just with the under wears or even worst, from time to time without that. People even stop noticing these differences because it has become a norm in music industry.

Internet is filled up by that kind of examples where females are half naked and males are well dressed. For instance, the video of Robin Thicke ‘Blurred Lines’ (ft. T.I., Pharrell), men artists are with the suits while females who participating in this video clip are revealing a high degree of skin exposure, by these actions women are portrayed as sex objects. Furthermore, looking at the statistics, we have a clear view of music video content analysis. Statistics have indicated that approximately 40% to 75% of music videos contained sexual imagery.

We cannot deny the fact that raunchiness and hyper-sexuality have a big role in the popular music. The fact remains that, nowadays, the entertainment industry has an interest not just in the beautiful voices or shows. It is obvious that sex makes sell a lot too. In the performance industry, money comes from numbers of views, sold tickets or streams. It means that performers or their agents will try to do everything just to increase record sales and other revenue streams. The most common way to achieve this goal is by selling bodies - whether in a music video or in a cover page for a song. It is easy to notice that specifically female bodies are the ones to be on display. Women simply remain the object of sexual desire, the selling point, and the figures on exhibition.

Conclusion

Taking everything into consideration, it is obviously seen that the lack of equality between genders in music industry exists. There is a definite big imbalance in the music industry workplace between men and women workers. There is a consistently noticeable inequality in the pay gaps between male and female employees. In our evaluation of the work genders representatives, even different ways of how to achieve one or another work place are different for men and women. Candidates who want to get a place at one of the areas into the music industry are taking into the consideration not just by relaying on their talent, abilities or knowledges they earned, but as well attention goes into the gender of the candidate. Nowadays, male representatives are the ones who dominates music industry. Man earns more money, salaries are bigger for men employees not just because of the monthly amount they would get, additionally male worker would get more than a half bigger bonuses than the female who works in the same company. Additionally, for women it would be harder to get a job into the recording studio, to work as a songwriter or a producer. Nonetheless, women in music industry are still carrying the tag of body selling, of an object that is sexualized. Females are asked to use different appearance on the music videos than the man would have.