Radio stations are gatekeepers. What radio stations play, even today when only

Radio stations are gatekeepers. What radio stations play, even today when only a small number of people ‘tune into them’ shapes success across all platforms. Country music stations seldom play females, meaning that female country artists have an uphill climb if they want to succeed.

Learn more about the issue by reading Chris Willman’s column “How a twitter joke about women on country music radio reignited a firestorm.” (Here’s a PDF of the article in d2lm if you are having trouble accessing it on the internet).

Find some more evidence about how Women are marginalized and seldom played on country music radio stations. You may do this through trying to google other articles like Willman’s column, but you could also do this by researching a country music radio station’s playlist. Ensure that you are looking at a terrestrial radio station’s playlist (that is, one who broadcasts with towers on land) instead of an internet radio station. Internet radio stations operate differently, and pay artists significantly less money.

Incidentally, it’s interesting to compare the top songs in the country genre in America (as calculated by Billboard magazine, supposedly encompassing sales, radio airplay, streaming plays, and social media engagement; NOTE – to see the most current list, you have to subscribe, which is why I linked to a wikipedia page) and what is played on a single streaming service (Search for the Spotify playlist Country Music Top 50; here’s mid September 2022). Compare either of those lists with the song compiled of radio airplays, or the “Billboard Country Airplay” list. This list contains the songs played on terrestrial radio stations in the last year. Like other Billboard lists it isn’t available without a subscription, but you can see previous years’ lists. Here’s 2021’s list of radio airplay.

In your post, Answer the following questions or prompts.

1. Explain how country music radio stations offer unequal access for women.

2. How does this imbalance in representation affect the country music audience?

3. If the radio stations play what’s market-tested (a typical practice in radio, all genres, since the 1980s), and market testing suggests that country listeners want to listen to men sing instead of woman, what changes would need to happen in order to increase the presence of women in country music?