January 22, 2020

Raw Data: Women in Songwriting

I don’t know squat about modern music, so I was a little surprised to see the latest stats on the number of women who write popular music. In short, there are hardly any:

The figures for 2019 are worse for producers (5 percent female) but a bit better for performers (22.5 percent female).

There’s more here in the full Annenberg report. I do have one comment about all this: I’ve heard of all but two of the top women songwriters but I’ve only heard of one of the men. This is mostly a commentary on my dismal knowledge of contemporary music, but I wonder why that is?

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

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