Half the Music, None of the Charts

The numbers are embarrassing when you actually look at them. In the UK album charts last year, Dua Lipa was the only woman in the top ten—one out of ten, in a year when some of the most culturally discussed music came from women. Ariana Grande was the sole female artist in the global top ten most-streamed performers. In Germany, Helene Fischer was the only woman in the top twenty domestic artist charts. This isn’t a taste problem or a quality problem. It’s structural, and it’s been structural for decades, and listing it out loud on International Women’s Day doesn’t fix it but at least stops everyone pretending it isn’t there.

Universal Music’s annual #Feminize campaign uses the occasion to make the gap visible—enlisting artists including Dua Lipa, German pop singer Lena Meyer-Landrut, and world-renowned classical violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter to add their voices, alongside a tool that analyzes your Spotify playlists and shows you what percentage of what you actually listen to is by women. I ran mine. I wasn’t proud of what I saw.

No matter how different we are—our backgrounds, our stories, our journeys—we are all something special and we stand united, Dua Lipa said of the day. I hope that I can be an example to others that you can achieve anything you set your mind to and work hard for. It’s a careful statement, crafted for a campaign, but she’s also a genuine example of the thing she’s describing—one of the most commercially dominant artists in the world right now, and still, in those numbers, an anomaly.

That’s the part that stays with me. Not the statistics themselves, which are familiar enough to have lost their shock value, but the specific absurdity of Dua Lipa—at this point basically a unit of cultural mass—being the single exception in a top ten. The chart doesn’t describe what people love. It describes something else, something upstream from taste, and until that changes the numbers will keep coming back looking more or less the same.