They Don’t Play a Lady-O on Country Radio

Back in May 2015, a radio consultant said in an interview about programming that women in country music are not the lettuce in the salad, but the tomatoes — they should be “sprinkled” on the playlist and not played back-to-back. This was the first public admission of a statistical formula guiding radio practices around gender.

This wasn’t new information for those working in radio. As Marissa Moss highlights in her book “Her Country,” the rule about avoiding playing women back-to-back was written into a widely read programming manual:

Even beyond this manual, this practice of not programming songs by women back-to-back goes back to at least the 1960s. When TomatoGate erupted in the industry, one former program director said, “...since the 1960s, program directors have been telling people not to play two women back-to-back. It has nothing to do with sexism. It has to do with the fact that through the years, you have had very few hits by women, so you want to spread them out a little bit because there are fewer of them.” For program directors, he said, “it was a matter of balance.”

But you’d think that, over time, as more and more women pursued careers in country music, with more songs being released by women, program directors would eliminate this rule because they had more songs to play. Sadly, that doesn’t seem to have been the case.

Research on representation of women in the industry has shown that songs by women have always been underrepresented on industry charts, which suggests that they also were receiving limited airplay at radio. One study shows us that songs by women increased gradually over four decades of the long-running Billboard Hot Country Songs chart from 6.5% in 1958 to a peak of 33.1% in 1999 — a period that many reflect on as one in which songs by women across all genres were charting in greater numbers.

But for country music, this was an historic peak. Following a “banner year” in which songs by women made up 33.1% of the Billboard Hot Country Songs chart — that was at the time based solely on radio airplay — the percentage of charting songs by women gradually declined in years that followed, reaching a low of 11.4% in 2015 (the year the infamous tomato statement was made) and has averaged 15% over the last 7 years. Billboard now incorporates more metrics than just radio airplay into the Hot Country chart, but the numbers from the early 2000s are on par with what we see in Mediabase airplay data, which is what we used to calculate the back-to-back rates of play in this piece.

What happened to cause such a downward turn in the early 2000s that is still being felt in the industry to this day? Changes in federal legislation, for starters.

In 1996 the Telecommunications Act went through its first major overhaul in just over 60 years. Amendments to the law loosened ownership regulations: not only could a single company now own more stations, but it also was allowed to purchase multiple stations in a single market (depending on its size).

With fewer companies owning more and more stations through the late 1990s and early 2000s, programming became increasingly centralized: fewer individual station playlists led to fewer spots for new songs, which led to fewer opportunities for artists already marginalized within the industry.

One consultant, Mr. TomatoGate himself, removed half of the songs by women from his scheduling catalog and reported a ratings increase. He then replicated this experiment across other stations and reported the same. Interestingly, he never tested what would happen when reducing the number of songs by men, stating that such a metric would not work in country music.

The result of these experiments was a decades-long consultancy practice built around the idea that programming songs by women at 13-15% of radio playlists was good for business. But this quota has had long-term consequences for the industry, and the declining presence of songs by women at country radio has resulted in fewer opportunities for women to build their careers.

It’s become a self-fulfilling prophecy. The lack of radio airplay for songs by women deters labels from investing in women artists and publishers from encouraging their writers to pen songs for them. It means that fewer songs by women chart, limiting their potential reach in being discovered by audiences, because they are receiving fewer opportunities to perform at festivals, on tour, or on award shows. Heck — radio airplay and chart positions also determine which artists get to walk the red carpet at industry events.

And since both the Country Music Association and Academy of Country Music use chart positions to determine eligibility for many of their awards, fewer songs by women are eligible for consideration.

And this entire discussion really only centers around the careers of white women in the industry, because Black, Indigenous and women of color are still to this day excluded from participation within the country music industry. Just 6 solo Black women and 1 group of Black women have charted since 1958, and in 2022 songs by Black women received just 0.03% of radio airplay — with spins almost entirely in the evenings and overnights.

The same dire statistics are true for LGBTQIA+ artists, who received 0.13% of the airplay in 2022.

The absolute lack of airplay for songs by women of color and LGBTQIA+ artists has resulted in significant limitations to opportunities within the industry. What’s worse, the absence of airplay is then used in discussions about the commercial viability of these artists to justify and maintain industry practices that limit their potential.

Knowing this existing gender bias and racial inequity in country radio, we set out to find out just how bad is bad, especially for back-to-back spins, an audible confirmation of country radio's tokenism — the idea that you’ve played one woman so you don’t need to play any more. But, of course, it’s fine when 20 different men sing about trucks and beer.

We looked at 29 country radio stations across the US — both large markets and large country markets. The station data we saw earlier was from San Antonio’s KCYY-FM. As bad as those numbers seemed, it’s actually one of the better stations for playing songs by women back-to-back at 0.99%.

For some of the stations, you could go a full day or more without hearing a song by women played back-to-back. To test if the rate of back-to-back plays for women’s songs is what we’d expect given their already low rate of overall play, we decided to run 1,000 “coin flip” simulations for each station. These simulations took into account the total number of songs played for each station across 19 days and the percentage that women’s songs are played overall in the same time span.

In 17 of the 29 stations, we saw actual observed rates of play for women’s back-to-backs (the blue line in the below charts) that were lower (to the left) than their expected range of plays (tan bars) if left up to chance. This hints that the low rate of women’s back-to-back plays at these stations is an active programming decision, not a random coincidence.

The lack of women’s back-to-back songs isn’t just extended time without alto twang, vocal cry breaks, pitch-perfect harmonies, soaring vocals, and the instrumental virtuosity of women artists. You’re also missing empowering, personal testimonials of love, loss, friendship, intergenerational relationships, trauma. These stories — often centered around the experiences of women, people of color, and the LGBTQ+ community — get erased when they’re not played on radio. It alienates a huge portion of people who want to see and hear themselves in country music. Singer-songwriter Brandi Carlile expands:

In addition to the loss of stories, the underrepresentation of women, artists of color and LGBTQ+ artists and the lack of back-to-back rotation of their songs contributes to a culture in which their voices are unfamiliar to audiences. Repetition is a core element to a genre’s evolving sound and culture, shaping audience familiarity with artists and their voices. So, the more songs by men are played, the more familiar listeners become with their voices.

But the reverse is true, too. The less that songs by women, artists of color and LGBTQ+ artists are played – in daytime hours and in close succession to each other – the less familiar they are to audiences. Spreading their songs out within a 24-hour cycle contributes significantly and damagingly to a culture of inequity in country music. Not only do radio listeners assume based on this programming that only a few (white) women participate in making country music, but they also develop harmful beliefs about who “belongs” in the industry. This is a culture that privileges white men – old and new – at the expense of all other artists.

Radio airplay, which builds exposure for artists and creates pathways to industry popularity charts, is also linked to opportunity and access to resources within the industry, including touring, festivals, merchandising, eligibility for awards, and more. At the same time, radio airplay influences how labels sign, produce and promote artists, creating a feedback loop within the industry ecosystem that also impacts songwriters and publishers, studio and touring musicians, and production teams responsible for mixing/recording new music. The path for white women in the industry is faint, but as Andrea Williams explains explains: the path for women of color is non-existent.

To test see if the rate of back-to-back plays was what we’d see if it was left up to chance

Data from the 29 stations shows that women artists are often played during the evening (7pm–midnight) and overnight (midnight–6am) hours when listenership is down. On average, 65.1% percent of songs by women played back-to-back come during these hours — very “if songs by women artists are played back-to-back and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” energy.

Just under 80% of the songs by women played back-to-back are “gold” or “recurrent” songs. Gold songs, not to be confused with the Recording Industry Association of America’s gold record sales designation, are hits that are several years old — think Carrie Underwood or Taylor Swift in the mid-to-late 2000s — that have become part of a station’s back-catalog of songs. “Recurrent” songs are songs that have hit their peak within a station’s playlist (and industry charts) but are still part of regular programming (some will eventually become part of that “gold” catalog). This means that there’s reduced room for current songs from today’s biggest women country stars like Maren Morris, Miranda Lambert, and Lainey Wilson, who are among 2022’s most-played artists, regardless of gender.

Now, no one’s hating on Carrie or Taylor — their classics deserve lasting airplay — but it does seem like country radio largely avoids today’s songs by women.

And when current songs by women do get played, it’s often the same handful of artists. The top 3 current women artists make up 52% of current airplay for women. The top 3 men account for 20.3% of current airplay for men.

So women have the deck stacked against them: their songs are played less often overall, less often back-to-back, less often during prime listening hours, and less often even if they have new music. And this is all compounded for artists of color, women artists of color, queer artists, and those at all the intersections.

Where back-to-back spins for songs by women were on average 0.5% of all airplay, back-to-back spins for songs by all artists of color averaged 0.38% and back-to-back spins for those by women artists of color were non-existent. Out of 182,848 total songs from the 29 stations we surveyed, there was a single back-to-back song pair from out LGBTQ+ artists: On February 7, 2022 at 2:16pm Chicago WUSN-FM played the Brothers Osborne’s “Stay A Little Longer” followed by Hunter Hayes’ “Wanted.” Non-binary and trans artists are completely absent on mainstream country radio.

So not only is country radio not playing the “tomatoes” of the salad, it’s not playing the cucumbers, or the carrots, or the celery, or the croutons, or even the dressing. You’ve just got the lettuce. And what the hell kind of a salad is that?

Water...you’ve got crunchy water.