MoPOP (aka EMP) Pop Conference 2018

To go with Liz' piece, I added a tl;dr summary of the actual gender-patterns in Spotify listening here:

http://everynoise.com/gender_tldr.html

(Spotify editorial programming actually has better gender-balance than overall or self-directed Spotify listening. But obviously it's catchier to blame a few Spotify editors, rather than all the listeners in the world.)

Glenn's own talk being b2b with Liz at the conference was v good and entertaining programming.

X-post- Pelly was highlighting the flaws of the most popular Spotify playlists, although averaging all playlists and looking at consumers has value as well.

Except without any baseline other than an implied 50%, her numbers have no context. I don't think anybody believes that the music business is anywhere near gender-balanced. Female artists get only 20% of the streams on Spotify, overall. Liz was only counting artists, not streams, but by her numbers Today's Top Hits, New Music Friday and Viva Latino all had more than that. Rap Caviar, Rock This and Hot Country had less, but my published tables include this one broken down by genre:

http://everynoise.com/tview.cgi?source=gender_listening_patterns&sort=poprank&colorthis=true

in which you can see that the overall female-artist streamrates for the popular hip-hop forms range from 1% to 5%. So Liz's observed 8% on Rap Caviar is technically progressive, not regressive.

"modern rock" and "alternative rock" hover around 13-15%, and Liz found Rock This had 14% female or mixed-gender artists, so that's merely on par. Country is 5-11% female by streams, and she found 8% on Hot Country.

So she claims to be doing a data-based study, but data does not support her conclusions or disdain.

(Of course, both her conclusions and her disdain were established in her previous pieces about Spotify.)

Except for the stuff in her talk about the Smirnoff Equalizer, which I fully agree was a terrible idea. Spotify didn't do it, and I'm embarrassed on our behalf that it was done with our corporate endorsement, but its flaws (both moral and technical) have literally nothing to do with anything within Spotify itself, or with any work done by Spotify employees.

I mean, all of this is just grappling with the fact that that across all platforms and all media, the majority of people do not want to listen to (or read, etc.) women more than occasionally, and most editorial programming is actively working against what people want. which is of course massively depressing, even if you think that said editorial programming works to change people's listening habits and isn't just the equivalent of secretly blending kale into chocolate ice cream.

I said this at the talk but I mostly wonder about the reverse -- whether, seeded with non-men, recommendations continue to suggest them, or regress toward the mean. if there really is a bias, it would work the opposite way as well. and then there's also the question of whether that's even a good thing -- one of the more common complaints about music writing is female artists compared to other female artists, which is an analog version of the same thing. (for what it's worth, I have always hated that argument; the way to fix it is to not stop mentioning female artists, which is stupid, but to compare male artists to them)

So, I was poking at more versions of this question yesterday, in Spotify data, and one of the things I calculated was the number of female Related Artists we show for each artist, aggregated by source-artist gender. This isn't an independent variable, because Related Artists are calculated from (mostly) listening patterns, but it gets at this specific question you're asking better than the other aggregates.

I found that female artists, on average had 50% female related artists, and the distribution (from 0-20) was basically flat from 0-10 and then slowly declining as you get towards 20.

But for male artists, the average was 3 female related artists (out of 20), and the distribution looked like a textbook power-law: tons of male artists with 0 female related artists, declining precipitously.

I don't actually believe that "the majority of people do not want to listen to women more than occasionally", although I agree there's plenty of empirical support for that contention. I think it's slightly more insidious than that: the inexorable inertia of ingrained normative maleness. Women make great music, but so do men, and if you're getting a stream of music you like, you're not actively prompted to think about what else you're missing but might like just as well.

Which was the point of the playlist series I made for my PopCon talk (click the genre links here: http://everynoise.com/tview.cgi?source=gender_listening_patterns&sort=poprank&colorthis=true): to try to algorithmically produce genre-by-genre "normal listening" playlists that work without any caveats, but which just happen to consist entirely of female or mixed-gender artists. It doesn't work uniformly well, because the distribution of artist-genders by genre isn't uniform or independent, either. But it's interesting, I think.

skip/like/dislike rate would possibly be telling in one direction or another there (this looks at skips by men vs. women, but not *of* men/women https://musicmachinery.com/2014/05/02/the-skip)

Ned's presentation has me wanting to go back and listen to old Associates records.

Where’s the 2019 thread? How was it? Tweets looked interesting

Hi!

Hee, read this.

My presentation:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTpAkmIFt7I

Dramatic Soto #PopCon pic.twitter.com/FIhRtem61w

— Ariane Grand Marnier (@awardtour) April 14, 2019

Thanks. Anybody see the DC go-go presentation or the controversial I think one that criticized riot grrl as racist and classist

posts very much in character

2020 conference online today. Video streaming today ( but may not be archived)

https://www.mopop.org/programs-plus-education/programs/pop-conference/

I liked the kwaito talk & the baile funk one

The noisy rap Korean duo xxx one was ok.

Chicago drill rap and Los Angeles all ages places will be discussed today

Is there a pop con 2021 thread?

Heard some of the Black Critic round table with longtime critics like Greg Tate, Daniel Smith, Wesley Morris, Daphne Brooks

Also Thulani Davis and Kimberly Mack

Interesting, although there was some grumbling about kids in college these days don’t know Afrika Baambaata etc stuff, and Tate talking about old school 1980s Voice stuff in a way that both had me wishing to hear younger critics . But they are all so bright and courageous that this is just nitpicking

It was an extremely good panel, that one. But the whole day was a treat. Alfred brought some prime ILX-level snark, dare I say.

Oh I wish I heard that

Thanks, Ned. The subject:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/09/George_H._W._Bush_inauguration.jpg

This Marvin Gaye discussion going on now is really interesting. Discussion of album sonics as well musicians and their parents and more . Panelists Mark Anthony Neal, Shana Redmond. Guthrie Ramsey, Lynee Denise, & moderator RJ Smith

I wish they’d make these available on YouTube or something. I missed one about the US South as it was going on at the same time as the Black older critics round table. I missed some of that one too, plus some of Mark Anthony Neal re Marvin Gaye What’s Going On

Per comments elsewhere, every session including Q&A was recorded and there are plans for wider availability, I gather.