Study: Men Almost Never Sing Songwritten by Women
pudding.cool
pudding.cool
Women cover male songwriters frequently, but who are the great female songwriters? Joni Mitchell, Billie Holiday, Kate Bush, and so on. They all tend to be excellent vocalists who write stuff that the average man simply can't match. While the great male songwriters are often weak to average singers: Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Lennon/McCartney. Women kill on those songs, with barely an effort sometimes.
As for modern Top40. It sucks. Who cares?
Not actually all that much among pop singers though. Most successful male artists tend to have quite high natural singing voices and females fairly low. And at any rate most music can easily be transposed as necessary. But I do agree there is a tendency by many male singer/ songwriters to stick to less vocally demanding melody lines. I'm less convinced that would be much of a deterrent for dedicated female songwriters hoping to pen tunes that were well suited to male voices.
Why even bother trying as a man then
I, for one, thought it was interesting. I like listening to good music too, and I wonder if I would be able to listen to more good music if more women were able to break into the professional music-making industry.
Simply informing me that women don’t write many top hits, by itself, is sorta like… “Ight, and?”
But you are correct. Perhaps I’m projecting a bit in my reflection here. I guess I just wanted to article to be more actionable if it was committed to being whiny.
Is it because there are fewer women songwriters? Is songwriting mostly dominated by a few superstars? Is it because women write specific kinds of songs?
Lots of follow-ups I'm curious about. Just out of idle curiosity, not because of some war waging. Obviously the website does have some strange things like "Women only get to write x% of songs". We're in an incredibly democratized era for music so they can write and have someone perform whatever they want and put it on Spotify.
Discoverability is a problem, and I miss Amie.st that rewarded you for being early to recommend a good song.
FTFY.
> but it actually suggests something more vital: you cannot talk about the history of music without talking about men actively limiting the musical activities that women were allowed to participate in, sometimes via physical or sexual violence.
> men have continually tried to define what is appropriate for women to do in music. When you listen to women who have worked in the industry, you’ll see that these attitudes have persisted.
Do they mean lyrics? In that case, they should know that the singer is often added as an afterthought so that the song sells better which could drastically change the final tally. Do they mean the actual notes of the song itself? In that case, how many women were in the industry to begin with? Perhaps women are vastly overrepresented relative to their footprint in the industry. Did they include music producers in this?
The irony in all this is that scientific and collegiate researchers have solved these (not all) issues of bad research and will readily tell you how to prepare and lay out a well-designed study. These authors couldn't even be bothered to research how to design an effective study but at least there are pretty graphics to look at.
It feels sort-of like a good "explainer" YouTube video with voiceover and graphics but -- instead of being forced through the material at the pace chosen by the author -- I get to freely move through it at my leisure. I can skip ahead, linger, or go back.
If the text was above/below the images (like a python notebook) and the images were static, I imagine I would like it a lot more.
The word in question was "trifling".
Also, some credits were only there due to sampling, the songwriters did not actively sit down and write or co-write that particular song.
Given that music has been almost completely democratised with the lowest barrier to entry there has ever been, it's hard to say women are being prevented from songwriting, but breaking into the highest echelons of the hit industry (a dubious accolade) might be tougher. We don't know how many are trying.
Apparently singing was considered girly or something. Writing wasn't though, because you'd have teenage boys write rap songs - I avoided a lot of bullying by producing work impressive enough to gain some respect among the school thugs - even though it was essentially a diss on the whole culture.
Anyway I landed in a choir only because I was shanghaied into it by my (female) friend. Was a nice change of pace, but the male/female ratio was only slightly different compared to my previous activity - theatre.
What I'm getting at is that not everything has to be intersectional.
The presentation is designed beautifully, and executed well. I personally despise custom scrolling mechanics that make it near impossible to revisit earlier information cogently, but I can appreciate the aesthetics of the thing.
I feel these sorts of set ups are designed and developed because the people building them already know all of the pertinent information they contain, and so see this as a great, or at least interesting, way to view the data, but I feel that this sort of medium is incomprehensible for someone who is clicking this without previous knowledge of the dataset.
Due to the headline I was intrigued to know just what popular songs were written exclusively by women and what the ratio was for some of my own favourite popular songs was, but I had to wade through a sea of smooth animations to finally be unable to interact with the information I wanted.
Sure lists and spreadsheets are boring to some, but in my opinion they are far more effective at getting your data across.
If you're a designer, please just design a more beautiful experience of /exploring/ the dataset rather than a more beautiful /presentation/ of the dataset.
I think a better way to look at it would be to address how song writing credits are assigned, who is getting them and why? Are male producers and session guys, forcing their way into the credits or are artists sampled or with similar previous work being preemptively added?
Plus it's nicely made.
That said, I feel like I have little to no insight into how songwriting works as an industry. Who chooses songwriters for a headline act? How much say do the performers have? What ostensibly motivates the choices of whoever chooses?
The conclusion implicit throughout the article (made explicit at the end) is that this data is the result of bias, and I suspect that's probably right. But I'd love to hear more about where and how that actually happens.
The days of Joni Mitchell holing up in a Paris estate with Steinway grand to pour out her soul, and make it up the charts are long gone.
But how many men could cover a Kate Bush song without it being ridiculous?
Tin Pan Alley was still more individually driven than what we have today where a tune is passed around between as many as 10-20 producer/songwriters who add some technical candy to the mix. Many of these songs lack bridges or even choruses, and are highly assisted by technology. T-Pain made it big because he mastered Auto-Tune very early, for example.