Financialized music ownership correlates with sharply reduced diversity among artists

Evidence

Amid this inequality in a gilded age of music, listener data are showing a reduction in the diversity of music across many vectors of gender, class, and ethnicity. A report on Spotify’s most-streamed artists in 2018 indicates that all of the top artists are men. A deeper analysis of six hundred Billboard Hot 100 songs from 2012 to 2017 found an average of 16.8 percent female performers, 12.3 percent female songwriters, and only 2.1 percent female producers. A UK study found that only 12 percent of musicians in 2019 were from a working-class background, down from 20 percent in previous years; women and people of color were further disadvantaged. In Canada, female artists make 82 cents for every dollar made by male artists, while Indigenous artists make only 68 cents on the dollar. Power in the music industries is increasingly held by financiers with no incentives other than a return on investment, and the diversity and heterogeneity of our musical culture is under threat. — Andrew deWaard, Derivative Media, 236

Categorization

• QUESTION: The passage asserts correlation between financier ownership and reduced diversity — this is exactly the causation-vs-correlation tension the reader wants to probe. Is the diversity drop caused by financialization, or by platform algorithms and streaming economics?
• SEED: A concrete data-driven essay could trace whether the drop in female producers (2.1%) and working-class musicians tracking financialization of the industry is causal or merely parallel to platform consolidation.