Music writer Liz Pelly - journalism’s most diligent critic of the outsize influence Spotify is currently wielding in popular culture - conducted a micro-study on Spotify’s algorithmic sexism for the Baffler earlier this year. The biggest question facing Spotify in the coming year should be whether it can do something about it.
Looking at the past several years of the charts, this polarization looks like more than garden-variety cultural sexism - it looks like something new that our algorithm-based platforms have wrought. These results are even stranger given the number of women - Adele, Taylor Swift, Rihanna, Beyoncé, and Pink, to name a few - who pulled off blockbuster albums with millions of sales, in a time when a platinum album is supposedly impossible. In 2016, Rihanna was the only woman at the top of the list. No big surprise there, as the exact same thing happened last year. This is, as Spotify put it on the company blog, “how 191 million people around the world streamed music and content in 2018.” Top female artists were also included in the platform’s year-end data haul, in a separate list
Dua Lipa was the only female artist with an album in the global top five, but she didn’t have a top song either. 4 on the US’s top albums list, though it didn’t appear in the global top five and she didn’t have a top song. Top female artists were also included in the platform’s year-end data haul, in a separate list.Įlsewhere in the rankings, women hardly existed: Cardi B’s Invasion of Privacy was No. (His breakout hit was “All Girls Are the Same.”) “Nice for What” instead of “In My Feelings.” An honorable mention for Juice WRLD, part of the primarily American burgeoning genre of rap music infused with the regurgitated influences of early-aughts emo, in particular its throughline of misogyny. Narrowed down to the US, things were different but the same: Drake, Post Malone, XXXTenatacion, Travis Scott, and Khalid at the top.
The most-streamed artists on Spotify this year were Drake, Post Malone, XXXTentacion, J Balvin, and Ed Sheeran, and the top songs were Drake’s “God’s Plan,” XXXTentacion’s “SAD!,” Post Malone’s “Rockstar,” and Post Malone’s “Psycho,” followed by Drake’s “In My Feelings.”
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