On the Charts, It’s Ladies First
This could be the first time in a decade that a woman has the biggest song of the year
Over the past 10 years, as streaming has molded the music industry into new shapes, the biggest song of the year has changed shape, too — from kitschy pop rap (Macklemore and Ryan Lewis’ “Thrift Shop”) to sax-y funk (Mark Ronson and Bruno Mars’ “Uptown Funk”) to swaggering country rap (Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road”). But one thing has remained stubbornly the same: It’s been, well, super broy. So much so, in fact, that the last time a woman had the top song of the year was back in 2011, when Adele’s “Rolling in the Deep” hurtled to the top of the year-end charts. In 2012, Gotye’s “Somebody That I Used to Know” featured New Zealand singer Kimbra; apart from that, there hasn’t been a single woman credited with performing a year-end number one since.
Every year, the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Institute puts out a report on the state of diversity in music, and every year, the report on women is pretty bleak. In 2020, USC found that there were fewer women in the top songs it examined than in 2019, with female artists accounting for 20.2 percent, female songwriters making up 12.9 percent, and female producers a meager two percent. As you can see in the graph to the right, which shows the representation of men and women in the top 10 songs of each year, women started almost disappearing from the top songs around 2013, right as streaming started to take hold and be factored into chart methodologies.
But things are looking notably brighter so far in 2021. In a few months, we’ll likely see a woman crowned with the biggest song of the year for the first time in a decade: The front-runner is Olivia Rodrigo’s “Drivers License,” and when looking at the biggest songs in the first half of 2021, women account for four of the top five songs. Not so bro-y anymore.
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