2019: Archived Data

Country females held only 11 percent of the songs on the year-end country charts in 2019, a 66 percent decline from 2000, when women represented 33 percent. 

Indeed, there wasn’t one country female solo artist in the Top 15 most-played songs on country radio last year. The Top 40 list contained only three songs by solo females and one by Lady Antebellum, which means only 10 percent of the Top 40 songs were represented by country female voices. For the last several years, the best way for a solo female artist to have a radio hit is to duet with a male artist.

This has been a problem for most of the last decade. Indeed, women haven’t been well represented on the country charts since Taylor Swift was known for making country music.

Dr. Jada Watson of the University of Ottawa studied 150 songs from the year-end reports from 2000-2018, as well as the weekly airplay charts from 2002 – 2018. She discovered that the playing field is not only bad for women – it’s getting worse.

Watson found that the man with the most radio spins was Kenny Chesney, who had 6 million spins. That was twice the amount of the top-selling woman, Carrie Underwood, who had 3.1 million spins.  When it came to number-one records, male artists occupied the No. 1 spot for 85 percent of the last 17 years, while women claimed it only 11 percent and male-female duos represented 4 percent.

In the years studied, the artists with the most career spins have all been men — Underwood ranks at No. 11 and Miranda Lambert sits at No.  21 with less than 2 million career spins. Male artists who have emerged in the past five years have also had more spins than women artists who have been making music for decades. Florida Georgia Line (Number 13) and Thomas Rhett (Number 16) both rank higher than Lambert, who has been around much longer.  

In 2016, just three of the Top 30 most played acts on country radio were solo females — Carrie Underwood, Kelsea Ballerini and Miranda Lambert, according to Mediabase. 

For comparison, in 2015, there were only six songs by women on Billboard’s year-end list of the most heard songs on radio, and “Fly” by Maddie & Tae was the only song by a female artist(s) –and none in the Top 20.  

In 2014 women had three songs in country radio’s most heard 60 songs of the year and in 2013, there were six.  

In the past 25 years — beginning with 1989, the year Taylor Swift was born — there have only been three female artists who have won CMA Entertainer of the Year — Swift, Dixie Chicks and Shania Twain.

And it’s not that women aren’t being played because their music isn’t as good as men. Women in country are making some of the best music today—and that’s not just our opinion. In 2019, Kacey Musgraves Golden Hour won the Grammy for the all-genre Album of the Year, as well as Country Album of the Year, yet the album received little radio airplay. 

 Miranda Lambert won Album of the Year at the 2019 Academy of Country Music Awards—which she has done FOUR other times. A Rolling Stone story about sexism in country music noted that Miranda Lambert’s album, The Weight of These Wings, went platinum with minimal radio airplay. Her powerful song “Tin Man,” which received tremendous attention at the ACMs, peaked at N0. 35. The album doesn’t contain a Top 10 hit.