![]() It’s possible for an artist to break through to the top without paying - as Drake did this spring - to take over the top spots on every featured playlist on the entire platform for several days. ![]() The algorithms even prioritize songs that people finish over songs that they listen to part of or skip, so it stands to reason that passive playlist listening is boosting artists users might not even actually actively care about. Placement on these playlists leads a song to be added to more user-made playlists, to be suggested by the algorithm to other users who like other songs on those other playlists, and to entrench certain artists into the basic fabric of all listening through the service. Again, given the terms of the experiment, the “taste” here was purely that of the Spotify algorithm. On Discover Weekly - the personalized recommendation section of Spotify’s app, which helps users find new songs according to their pre-established taste - Pelly found that only 23.3 percent of the songs were led by or featured a female artist.On ¡Viva Latino!: 73 percent men, 24 percent women, the best numbers Pelly saw.On Rock This: 86 percent of songs per by all-male bands, 9 percent were by women-led bands, and 5 percent were by bands with “women involvement.”.21 Savage).’ This means that every week, for four consecutive weeks, and on a fifty-track playlist, only one song led by a woman artist appeared.” On Rap Caviar: “The only woman-led track present was Cardi B’s ‘Bartier Cardi (feat.On New Music Friday: 82.4 percent of songs included men, 37.2 percent included women.Pelly found that 85.5 percent of the songs that appeared on it all month included men, and 45.5 percent included women. Today’s Top Hits is the most-followed playlist on Spotify, with more than 22 million followers - 3 million more than when Pelly published her piece less than six months ago. “Is streaming culture merely reflective of a relentlessly male-centric status quo, or is it shifting us back toward a more homogenous and overtly masculine pop music culture?” she asked, pointing out that 2017 was the first year since 1984 that the Billboard year-end top 10 had been exclusively male artists.įor her experiment, she created a brand new Spotify account, so that all results would be from a clean slate - pure algorithm, to confirm “that when a user listens to mostly male-dominated playlists, what is produced are yet more male-dominated playlists.” She listened to nothing but Spotify’s featured playlists and their subsequent recommendations for a month then she downloaded spreadsheets of the data and found that she was right. Music writer Liz Pelly - journalism’s most diligent critic of the outsize influence Spotify is currently wielding in popular culture - conducted a micro-study on Spotify’s algorithmic sexism for the Baffler earlier this year. The biggest question facing Spotify in the coming year should be whether it can do something about it. Looking at the past several years of the charts, this polarization looks like more than garden-variety cultural sexism - it looks like something new that our algorithm-based platforms have wrought. ![]() These results are even stranger given the number of women - Adele, Taylor Swift, Rihanna, Beyoncé, and Pink, to name a few - who pulled off blockbuster albums with millions of sales, in a time when a platinum album is supposedly impossible. In 2016, Rihanna was the only woman at the top of the list. No big surprise there, as the exact same thing happened last year. This is, as Spotify put it on the company blog, “how 191 million people around the world streamed music and content in 2018.” Top female artists were also included in the platform’s year-end data haul, in a separate list ![]() Dua Lipa was the only female artist with an album in the global top five, but she didn’t have a top song either. 4 on the US’s top albums list, though it didn’t appear in the global top five and she didn’t have a top song. Top female artists were also included in the platform’s year-end data haul, in a separate list.Įlsewhere in the rankings, women hardly existed: Cardi B’s Invasion of Privacy was No. (His breakout hit was “All Girls Are the Same.”) “Nice for What” instead of “In My Feelings.” An honorable mention for Juice WRLD, part of the primarily American burgeoning genre of rap music infused with the regurgitated influences of early-aughts emo, in particular its throughline of misogyny. Narrowed down to the US, things were different but the same: Drake, Post Malone, XXXTenatacion, Travis Scott, and Khalid at the top. The most-streamed artists on Spotify this year were Drake, Post Malone, XXXTentacion, J Balvin, and Ed Sheeran, and the top songs were Drake’s “God’s Plan,” XXXTentacion’s “SAD!,” Post Malone’s “Rockstar,” and Post Malone’s “Psycho,” followed by Drake’s “In My Feelings.”
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |