This Is Where Spotify Has Placed All Female Artists.
There are more men than women in the best Spotify playlists. Not only algorithmic playlists that reproduce inequalities in the music industry as a whole, but also in carefully curated playlists , according to Baffler’s in-depth article filled with statistics . For example, the most popular Spotify playlist in 2017 was RapCaviar , a spinning playlist of fifty tracks with 9 million subscribers. For the entire month that Baffler tracked, it featured one song, led by a woman. One .
This imbalance can seep into your Discover Weekly playlist, so if you just follow Spotify’s directions for what to listen to, you may end up listening exclusively to male artists. The Spotify “fix” for this was a Smirnoff-branded app that “leveled” your playlist; the app has disappeared .
If you want to meet more female artists, you can try Spotify’s “Women Of” playlists. (According to Baffler, these playlists promote “the idea that gender is a genre, or the idea that women artists should be valued for their gender, not their music.”) Search for “women from” on Spotify, and you will dig up these lists, each with less than 1 million subscribers. The best playlists are Women in Pop , Women in Jazz and Women in Rock .
Or try out some custom playlists with the best gender composition: Ignatious Pop has compiled all songs from the first two seasons of HBO’s Insecure (see above). Erin La Rosa has prepared a short playlist for “Nasty Women”. Our sister site Jezebel has a collection of feminist- themed playlists . This is a workaround, not a solution – Spotify remains indebted to the public to better represent women in its official playlists, making them available to millions of subscribers. But until they get together, realize what they are doing and find your music.