As triple j, Double j and Unearthed celebrate International Women’s Day with all-women presenters spinning songs from female artists all day for #GirlsToTheFront, Hack has crunched the numbers on the representation of women in the Australian music industry.

Hack set out to get a clearer understanding of how women work, perform, get recognised and get airplay in the music industry today.

We had A LOT of questions.

How many women are getting paid for their music in Australia? What kind of artists are getting the most love on festival lineups? Is there gender parity on peak music industry boards, and are women more likely to manage labels or artists than men? Are men getting more music award nominations than women? Why is female representation in music still an issue in 2016?

Nerding out over countless spreadsheets, hours of manual counting, graph-making and fact-checking ensued.

Focusing on the last twelve months in the Australian music industry, these stats and figures only scratch the surface of the entire scene; they’re a sketch for a much larger picture of the Australian music industry - and the place women have in it.

With that in mind, here’s what we found.

Getting paid

If you’re working as a songwriter, an artist manager, an indie label manager or on the board of a peak music body - you’re more likely to be a man than a woman, Hack found.

If you’re working at triple j, Double j or Unearthed (hey fam!) you’ll find the office is almost exactly split between guys and gals.

The gender divide between registered APRA members was one of the most drastic across our entire analysis - only about 1 in 5 APRA members are women. That number might seem low, but it was a 3.8% increase from the previous year. At the very least, Australia's doing better than the UK in this respect: only 16% of writers registered with PRS for music (the UK's ARPA-equivalent) are women.

In addition, APRA outlined the genres where women are under-represented and over-represented. Only 7% of jingle writers in the industry are women; 53% of children's music writers are women.

The APRA figure is important for a few reasons. APRA AMCOS helps artists get paid for their work. If a song you wrote gets played on triple j, for example, you’ll get royalties - collected and paid out by APRA.

But there's definitely female artists out there who wouldn’t have registered with APRA. If you’re a frontwoman of a band whose songs you don’t actually write, you wouldn’t be registered with APRA. If you’re just starting out, and a song you wrote hasn’t had any airplay on radio before, you might not be registered with APRA. But as APRA’s member base is a huge sample (over 85,000 registered members) we can reasonably assume that it’s a fairly accurate reflection of the large gender gap between songwriters in Australia.

Getting gongs

Out of the APRA awards, ARIAs and J awards in 2015, APRA nominations were the most evenly-split between male and female artists, with 46% of nominations going to female solo artists or acts with at least one woman.

The ARIAs, Australia’s biggest music awards, were much further off parity; 1 in 3 nominations went to solo female artists or artists with at least one woman.

In addition, 37 songs voted into triple j’s Hottest 100 this year were from artists with at least one woman. Twenty-four of those were by solo female artists, bands with a permanent female frontwoman or acts where at least half of its members are women. None of those songs scored enough votes to make it into the top 10.

As far as streaming goes, the stats are worse: Spotify Australia told Hack that there’s only 21 female artists in the top 100 most-streamed songs in Australia, and none of them are in the top 10.

Getting played

triple j’s three stations - triple j, Double J and Unearthed - play a big role for Australian music, as they're the only national music broadcaster for a young audience. Hack looked at every playlisted song for each station across one randomly-selected week: February 1 - 7 this year.

Getting on lineups

In an analysis of six of Australia’s prominent music festivals in the last 12 months, Hack found that festivals with EDM-heavy lineups had far less diversity.

While 38% of Laneway’s 2016 lineup were solo female artists or artists with women, Listen Out and Stereosonic had only 9% and 10% respectively.

For festivals like Falls, Splendour, Groovin' and Laneway, who all had over 30% female representation, it's worth noting the APRA breakdown of Popular Contemporary music members. According to APRA, 28% of songwriters in this category are women.

What does it all mean?

4-time ARIA award winner, 2015 J Award winner and Grammy nominee Courtney Barnett says the industry tends to favour men over women. "I feel like people are extra harsh or critical of female artists," Courtney Barnett told Hack.

I just get a couple of [comments like] ‘you play guitar as good as a man’, just casual, sexist comments."

Even though she's the frontwoman, Courtney says she's sometimes treated differently to her male band members. "I have to kind of say things five times, or ask the same question five times. Whereas I know even the guys in my band, or my manager ask it once and not be questioned.”

Milly Petriella, the Director, Member Relations at APRA AMCOS, told Hack that the issue is clouded by a lack of research.

"I was really surprised and shocked at this, when I looked at this last year. I didn’t think it would be that bad, but I also didn’t think there would be a lack of information out there to find out why. I didn’t expect there to be a 'this is why there isn’t women in the music industry' written on a plaque somewhere, but I really did think there would be a lot more research done than I was able to find."

Milly says the disparity between men and women in the industry is particularly perplexing - when the disparity tends to be the opposite among girls and boys.

"When girls go to school, up to year 12, there seems to be a greater representation of women in music. In choirs, musical theatre, singing, school bands.

"And then somehow, from that point, from 18 to going into the workforce, it completely swaps around. It’s almost like it’s 80% women when girls are younger, and in school, and it swaps around to 80% men when we’re talking about the workforce.

Why do girls lose confidence when they’re leaving school, that they don’t enter into the music industry?"

Jane Slingo, executive producer for the Electronic Music Conference, says the lack of women working in the Artist & Repertoire (A&R) departments of record labels and publishers could be part of the problem. A&Rs are responsible for talent scouting and artist development - they're the people that can give an artist their big break.

"There’s a severe lack of female A&Rs," Jane says, "And I think if that’s something that changes, I think that’s going to result in more female artists that are able to be curated on festival lineups.

"In Australia I can pretty much count on three fingers female A&Rs, and I think that’s something that’s kind of mirrored in a pattern internationally. I think if we start to see more females taking that role, surely there will be more of a focus and investment in developing female recording artists.

"That will actually put us in a much stronger position for have festival curators to have more to choose from."

Jane also says we can't squarely lay the blame on one part of the industry for the gender gap. "I think managers, agents, everyone has a role to play in this issue. I think it’s not something that we can kind of just point at awards nights or festival bookers. Because it’s a massive issue and it’s not going to change unless everyone’s on board and working hard as a community to change it."

How Hack crunched the numbers

Hack analysed most of the data ourselves - by going through festival lineups, award nominations and staff head counts. While this analysis has been fact checked by music library staff at triple j, we acknowledge that there’s always a possibility of human error in manual counts.

Some data was supplied from external sources or was available publicly - the Association of Artist Managers, the Association of Independent Record Labels, APRA and Spotify all supplied data to Hack. We also used numbers from Music Victoria about board members on peak music bodies - from this study conducted late last year.

The music library staff at triple j, Double J and Unearthed each conducted the analysis of their own playlists to categorise the artists as “solo female”, “artists with at least one woman” and “songs featuring guest female vocals”.

To reflect a typical, randomly-selected week across the station, the music libraries at triple j, Double J and Unearthed analysed songs from 1 - 7 February retrospectively. When programming the playlist for that week, the music libraries were not aware of Hack's analysis that would soon follow - so they could not have attempted to skew their playlist in advance.

For a staff head count at triple j, double j and Unearthed, Hack only counted who we call “music-related” staff. For example, none of the Hack team or triple j newsreaders were counted - we’re journos, not presenters or musos - so those (mostly female) teams were left out.

Want to share Hack's stats? High res copies of our infographics are available here, here, here and here.

Listen back to our International Women's Day special - hosted by Kaitlyn Sawrey.

Skip Instagram Post FireFox NVDA users - To access the following content, press 'M' to enter the iFrame. A photo posted by triple j (@triple_j) on Mar 7, 2016 at 12:37pm PST



