Commercial radio stations in Canada have failed to support female artists over the past decade, a new report finds.
According to the Canadian Press, an 11-year study using data from some of the most popular radio formats has revealed that songs by women – especially women of colour – received far less airplay on radio than male artists.
The report was released to coincide with Canadian Music Week, however, those who work in the music industry feel the lack of gender representation has been an obvious problem for quite a long time.
“Radio is the only system within the industry that collects and reports their data in such a transparent way," explained musicologist Jada Watson, a Principal Investigator of SongData and Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities at the University of Ottawa who presented "Share the Air: A Study of Gender Representation on Canadian Radio (2013-2023)" to the conference.
"Not only does the tracking of airplay generate industry charts, but because radio is governed by the Broadcasting Act, their data (reports) distribution by time of day, song type, and ... Canadian content regulations."
Through her SongData research program, Watson looked at the top 150 most played radio tracks from 2013 to 2023 on popular radio formats such as Top 40, country and rock music. According to the data, women were least represented on rock stations, where they were played an average of one time every four-to-five-hours. Alternative stations played a female artist on average once per hour, while country averaged two songs by female artists per hour.
Women of colour represented only 0.7 per cent of artists played on rock, alternative and country stations.
Pop formats such as Top 40, mainstream adult contemporary and hot adult contemporary fared better, with women averaging one-third of the songs played, however, women of colour onluy represented 6.5% of artists played.
One artist that had become an exception to the rule when it comes to alternative rock programming is Toronto's The Beaches, who won this year's Juno Award for Group of the Year. Their single "Blame Brett" reached #1 on the Mediabase alternative radio chart last year.
"It’s great, I love seeing the Beaches at the top of the chart," Watson said. "But they’re the only Canadian (female) act that gets up there and stays up there to that capacity."
Watson did find that there has been a "bump in programming" for songs by women across all radio formats in 2023, but adds that it's too early in the study to determine if that will remain.
You can read the full "Share the Air" study here.