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This report looks at the gender disparity in UK Radio for British Domestic acts over 2 sections. The first section is an analysis of 31 individual radio stations, looking at the gender disparity present in the Top 20 most played songs by British artists, in Britain, over the period of June 1st 2019 to June 1st 2020. The 31 stations include the Top 10 and the most listened to National, Regional & Local radio stations including the major legacy radio stations and genre-specific stations in Britain. The 2nd part of the report is an analysis on the Top 100 Radio Airplay songs in 2020, from 01 Jan 2020 to 15 August 2020, in all radio stations combined, looking at the gender disparity for Female, Male and Collaborations.
This Report is based on British domestic only artists, and those whose songs are registered on Radiomonitor. Radiomonitor is the industry standard music airplay monitoring service used by Record labels, Management companies and PR companies in the music industry to evaluate the airtime allocated to artists/bands who have commercial releases in the British market, and whose music is issued to British radio seeking radio airplay. All the radio data in this report is taken from Radiomonitor.
In relation to this report, Radiomonitor will not always have 100% of what is released in the British music scene if it is not registered by a label, company or radio station, therefore some songs could be missing if not received by Radiomonitor. However artists like Joel Corry, Dua Lipa, Mabel or artists of a similar profile are always registered as a rule, as it is part of music industry practice to monitor plays of artists of this calibre. So with that said, this report can be looked upon as a reflection of the biggest commercial artists who are on the British Music Scene with music being released to radio and stands as a solid factual based data report on the airtime allocation across British radio for its homegrown domestic acts and bands across female and male acts showing the most played British artists across each station. Radiomonitor also provide comprehensive coverage for independent artists and labels.
For the purpose of gender disparity reporting, all songs have been categorised as either Female, Male or Collab.
This data study aims to examine the British radio airplay system in relation to the most played domestic artists on heavy rotation across the stations in the report in gender terms.
Our definition of “female” includes anyone who self-identifies as a woman. However, we simultaneously recognise that most of those surveyed will identify as either male or female, and will be perceived by people within this binary.The research team has wished from the outset to be as inclusive as possible in our methodology.
We are following on from the approach to gender categories adopted by the Waking the Feminists research team in Ireland in their Gender Counts report.
Throughout this study, our approach to identifying individual’s gender has included a mixture of use of pronouns used on internet searches to identify gendered pronouns used, personal knowledge of music industry figures, as well as relying on the gendered nature of first names.
This approach is trans-inclusive, in so far as we accept the gender identity ascribed to the individual by the material.
Our efforts led us to identify one non-binary individual over the course of the research, though there may be more who remain unidentified. We have included non-binary artists in the acts and bands within collaborative male/female/non-binary section labelled ‘Collab’ in this report. While this study has done some work towards including trans- and non- binary individuals, a more detailed study of their participation in the sector would be appreciated.
