Women Remain Underrepresented in Music Industry, USC Annenberg Report Finds

The music business is still a boys’ club, according to a report breaking down the gender makeup on the credits for many of last year’s biggest songs.

The University of Southern California’s Annenberg Inclusion Initiative released its annual “Inclusion in the Recording Studio?” report on Wednesday, reflecting an industry stagnant in improving its mostly male ranks both for the artists it champions and the producers and songwriters behind the hits. While last year’s report suggested an improvement in 2023, the figures on the latest release were mostly flat.

Per the report, women made up 37.7 percent of artists on the year-end Hot 100 chart, 18.9 percent of the songwriter credits and just 5.9 percent of the producer credits. All of those figures are in line with last year’s report, when they were 35 percent, 19.5 percent and 6.5 percent, respectively.

“The music industry is a mirror to the film industry — there is a lot of fanfare about supporting women, but little actual change among the most popular songs,” founder of the Inclusion Initiative and the report’s author Stacy Smith said in a statement. “While there may be movement in the independent space, the songs and charts evaluated represent the agenda-setting music that has the greatest opportunity to launch and grow a career. Until the people in the executive ranks and A&R roles take seriously the lack of women in the industry, we will continue to see little change.”

As Smith said, women didn’t lose ground this past year, but seeing no improvement isn’t exactly promising. “For those interested in seeing change in the music industry, this is not a sign of progress,” Smith said.

She suggested stakeholders partner with advocacy groups focused on championing women in music such as Be The Change and She Is The Music. “These numbers can continue to grow if the industry looks to these organizations and the many qualified women ready to work as songwriters and producers,” she said.

Per the report, Representation for artists of color dipped last year, too, from 61 percent in 2023 to about 44.6 percent in 2024. That’s the lowest representation artists have seen since a decade ago, the report said, which is on par with underrepresented groups in the U.S. population and still an improvement from a decade ago.

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The report also analyzed the nominations for the six major categories for this year’s Grammy awards, again finding little improvement from a year ago after a promising increase. About 22.7 percent of the nominees this year were women, compared to 24 percent the year prior. While the artists behind the Album and Record of the Year nominations were mainly women, the producers and songwriters on those tracks were mostly men.

“The Recording Academy has demonstrated that it can recognize the contributions of women to the music industry — this is clear through the increase we observed last year and that it has continued into this year,” Smith said. “The challenge now is to continue that growth and to see more women receiving acknowledgement of their talent and effort through awards like the Grammy’s, particularly for women in producing roles.”

That producer role remains the clearest disparity in the industry, with men taking 94.1 percent of the producer credits on last year’s year-end Hot 100. There was a glimmer of hope in this year’s Producer of the Year nominations though, as Alissia broke a six-year drought becoming the first female nominee in the category since Linda Perry in 2019. Still, she’s only the ninth woman ever to be nominated, and no woman has ever won.