Thesis: Literature Review
An Examination of How Record Labels Promote Corporate and Social Diversity through Social Media in the Music Industry
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Introduction
Diversity is becoming a rising public relations issue for many organizations aound the world. Diversity is becoming a more prominent public relations concern for many organizations around the world, particularly in the United States. Growing media attention in recent years on issues such as the COVID-19 pandemic and the death of an unarmed Black man, George Floyd, has raised awareness of socioeconomic inequalities, putting pressure on CEOs to broaden the scope of their companies’ product and service offerings. In addition, social movements on a scale never before witnessed have been propelled by social media platforms in recent years. Conscious of the social injustices that exist in the corporate world, consumers are calling for a shift away from corporate structures that are linked with whiteness and success. This section reviews some of the available material on how record labels promote corporate and social diversity in the music industry through the use of social media platforms.
Gender Roles in the Music Industry, as well as the lack of Women in the Industry
In recent years, there has been a steady improvement in equality in terms of work opportunities and in society as a whole. Discrimination against American workers on the basis of race, sexual orientation, religion, sex, marital status, pregnancy status, gender, and national origin is a serious violation of the law. When it comes to the music industry, though, it is still overwhelmingly a male-dominated industry.
According to Statista, men accounted for 97.7 percent of all producers in the music industry in the United States in 2018, with women accounting for only 2.3 percent of the workforce. Users will see numerous female artists on social media, but they will be unaware that the music they are listening to that was performed by women is primarily created by men. In contrast, it’s important to remember that a society in which men worked outside the home and women stayed at home as housewives was acceptable decades ago. And today, many people who grew up as children during that period still believe that tradition is still relevant and relevant. It is logical that men are more likely than women to hold these positions of power, given that the majority of the workers in the business are not of my generation or older. While women have undoubtedly triumphed in their battle against this notion throughout the years, the battle is far from over. I believe society is evolving and the younger generations are changing tradition and promoting equality. It is true that there are a few inspirational women in the music industry who have made significant contributions to the industry. For instance, The New York Times states, “Taylor Swift and Nicki Minaj, along with Rihanna, have the most songwriting credits among women in pop music from 2012 to 2017, a study found.” (Sisario) Though their numbers are few, these women inspire many other females such as myself to continue into a male-dominated field despite the odds.
As things are now, the lack of female producers—and the concurrent number of female artists who have left the industry due to assault and intimidation at the hands of powerful men—could explain why women have been so underrepresented on end-of-year lists and in awards circuits. Plus, even if you do remain in the industry, it’s quite difficult to create work that’s true to your vision if you’re not writing and producing at least part of it. (Rihanna can do it, but then again, Rihanna is an ageless superhuman, so that argument is irrelevant). Many pop songs with female vocalists—especially the kind that are getting pumped out by increasingly desperate LA’s producers—were clearly not written by their singers, and so they’re weighed down by a kind of synthetic detachment. When women aren’t writing and producing, and when they’re singing words they don’t believe in, how could they possibly be making their finest work?
Recently, there has been an increasing level of awareness about the differential treatment of artists based on their gender in a variety of creative sectors (Smith, Choueiti, and Pieper 2017; 2018). The music industry is at the forefront of several mediatized debates related to systemic gender discriminations (Newman 2018), yet scholarly works that investigate the issue at scale are largely missing. Primarily due to difficulties in extracting and quantifying musical features in a non-automated way, previous studies focused on general compositional structures. For instance, recent work found no differences between male and female artists in terms of their high-level compositional quality (Sergeant and Himonides 2016). Yet, gender inequalities in the music context seem to be the status quo, mirroring disparities seen in other creative fields and beyond. While these gaps are well-documented in areas ranging from the workspace and wages (Blau and Kahn 2000; Kuhn and Villeval 2013) to educational opportunities, entrepreneurship and capital markets (Brooks et al. 2014; Kanze et al. 2017; Horvat´ and Papamarkou 2017), as well as leadership, it is largely underexplored in the case of the global music scene.
A lack of understanding gender differences in the music industry might contribute to the low recognition of female artists and could result in gender-related disparities in artistic leadership and innovation. To address this problem, we evaluated gender differences in popular music along a set of dimensions that have been linked by previous literature to gender inequalities, stereotyping, and discrimination. We found that male and female artists’ songs sound measurably different; artists tend to be associated by listeners with distinct genres and roles based on their gender; they are typically affiliated with different record labels; and male artists have more and better-connected collaborators in addition to being positioned in the core of the collaboration network. Our models, trained with features corresponding to these dimensions, suggest that we isolated key factors that distinguish male and female musicians’ work.
