Ken Ehrlich, the longtime producer of the Grammys, said that the performance would not “specifically” address the #MeToo movement but that the association with the news was deliberate. “Even though her story goes back several years,” he said, “the reality of what happened over the last four or five months will put a different spin on the way people will view it.”

Still, the lack of a more insistent call to arms by an agenda-setting pop star, or the industry writ large, has struck observers and insiders as baffling, with some offering explanations as to why no #MeToo-style reckoning has swept through the music industry the way it has Hollywood.

For one, there is simply a fear of reprisal in a business in which women are underrepresented in the studio and the executive suite. On Thursday, the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative at the University of Southern California published a report analyzing the personnel behind Billboard’s top songs from 2012 to 2017. Over all, it found that 78 percent of the 1,239 credited artists were men. Women made up only 12 percent of songwriters and 2 percent of producers.

Of the 899 people nominated in the last six Grammy Awards, the report found, 9 percent were women. (This year, Lorde is the only woman nominated for album of the year; she is not scheduled to perform.)

That structure has historically discouraged women in the business, said Dorothy Carvello, a former record executive who is the author of the forthcoming book, “Anything for a Hit: An A&R Woman’s Story of Surviving the Music Industry.”