Oh dear.

This morning (more stations at link below).

FIGHT!!

Gender Disparity in irish Radio (Linda Coogan Byrne)

Thanks Bebe

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52 thoughts on “Narrowband”

  1. fluffybiscuits

    I dont think its a gender disparity at all, its just they wont play poo music . If a song is good enough it gets played that is it

    1. ouch

      It’s not clear if they are showing the Top 5 songs played on each station, but if so there is plenty of poo..

  3. Markus

    Not sure who they are trying to get at here? The likes of Niall Horan and Dermot Kennedy would have a largely female fan base so it could be said that they are targeting a female demographic

  5. Rob_G

    All of the commercial radio stations decide their playlists based on market research of what songs are popular – DJs don’t have much autonomy over what they play.

    Niall Horan’s song was co-written by Ruth Anne Cunningham, so maybe considering only the performer is giving a somewhat of a narrow interpretation of the representation of women in radio stations’ airplay.

    1. Cian

      This.

      But it also depends on what type of shows are on these stations.
      – If the show is a chart show – it will reflect the current popular music – and that should be excluded from this analysis because it is only tell us what people have bought/listened to.
      – OTOH if the show is there to look at new and upcoming artists – then yes, there should be a reasonable mix of age/gender/nationality. Because this will influence what get to hear and will buy…. which will feed into #1 next month/year.

      The other aspect to consider is what percentage of up-and-coming talent is male or female. If 95% of them are male – then forcing a 50:50 mix on the radio is patently unfair.

  6. Captain Pants

    Top 5, not all songs, so not telling us much. There are thousands of songs played.
    Not the radio stations fault that the top 5 most popular songs skew male, they play the ones the audience wants to hear. If theres sexism its down the line somewhere.
    The top 10 books in Easons right now, is Easons sexist against men? (of course not, they are showing the books that sell most, and women read more particularly fiction than men)

    https://www.easons.com/custom-catalog/top-10-books/

    1. max

      Its actually top 20 , Superbad infographic,

      Was wondering how the top 5 song were played by 10 female artists/bands….

  7. max

    TLDR Female artists need to adjust their sound to target a broader demographic, so they have universal appeal like the Script

    Interesting that RTE got a 50/50 split, sounds very intentional, means they dont really care about what their listeners want to listen to.

      1. Cranky Cooke

        How’s it broken down by race? ethnicity? height? weight? age? it’s discrimination I telz ya!

  9. Micko

    I know, let’s pick a VERY specific subset and analyse only that – and then when it gives us the narrative we want, we’ll write a report that actually has “Gender Disparity” in the title, giving out about unfairness of that very specific subset.

    Brilliant :-)

  10. Janet, dreams of spidercrab and fancy pastries

    it’s a bit silly really, yours faithfully a woman

    1. Junkface

      Welcome to the wave of Nitpicking culture. People are sitting around looking for offense, or signs of inequality everywhere now. Things like Art and Music just don’t work that way. Depends on taste. Personally I would take Sinead O Connor over any of those artists in that list any day.

      Are we now going to count every actor in a movie to see if the genders are balanced? It’s all ridiculous, people need to get a life

    2. SOQ

      Faithfully a woman writes….

      err is that transgender, non binary, intersectionalist or cis woman? Do you menstruate? If so how often per week? And one final question- how big is your bluetits?

      1. Nigel

        ‘Womanhood’ is about to be rigorously policed I see. Interrogations and physical exams forthcoming.

  11. Optimus Grime

    I listen to a lot of classical and instrumental stuff it could be made by man, woman, monkey or semi-sentient plasma and I wouldn’t care the only thing I care about is the music. If we go down this road of we need to play music because it’s made by a group of people well then we are corrupting the whole process of artistry. A lot of the stations listed here are small commercial operations they need to play what is popular and ultimately the people who define that is the listener. Did they try talking to them at all?

  15. fluffybiscuits

    Dara Munnis
    @daramunnis
    ·
    11m
    Replying to
    @fluffy_biscuits

    @AineTyrrell
    and 11 others
    Naive and misinformed. There are long standing structures in place from labels, promoters, radio, etc which fully mould what music is popular. Only a small percentage can make it without these structures. The Irish system is statistically slanted against female representation
    Dara Munnis
    @daramunnis
    ·
    19m
    Replying to
    @fluffy_biscuits

    @AineTyrrell
    and 11 others
    If only there was a platform for them to use for said encouragement… Thumbs up

    Are they Sociology PHD students?

  16. wearnicehats

    I’ve just realised that my favourite own go-to playlist on Spotify contains 50 songs Of these only The Cranberries represent a human being of the female persuasion. Frankly, I’m disgusted with myself and unreservedly apologise to Linda and Aine. On a completely unrelated matter – does anyone remember Millie Tant in Viz?

  17. A Person

    How many black or Asian or Russian artists were featured? It appears to be all Irish white males. Its a disgrace. I am outraged.

  18. class wario

    gonna start a checklist of unoriginal gotchas people post in all posts like this:

    it’s actually women’s fault ✅

    what about [500 million genders][other races] ✅

    please suggest some more in the replies

  19. f_lawless

    The final page of the slideshow presentation:

    “In a post-Covid world, be the change you want to see. The hand that rocks the cradle can also rock the system, wear the skirt and have the revolver, be the known heroes that the past generations of women of Ireland were never allowed to be. Equality is no more a faded dream but a screaming song ready to be sung by women ready to be heard.”

    Reads like an appeal to the narcissistic individualism that’s now so prevalent in modern society at large (not limited to any one movement). You, the individual, can do and have it all. Strive to be the one that others adore

    1. Junkface

      Sounds a bit mental actually.

      “Wear the skirt and have the revolver?”

      Cultural revisionism (which is what this is, day by day) in the past was embarked on by Chairman Mao, The Khmer rouge, Stalin….etc. Its not a pretty list for reading, as it led to murder and genocide of millions. If this is where the left are allowing themselves to be taken by puritan extremists living in cloud Cuckoo land, we are screwed collectively.

      1. SOQ

        And of course Marx was a dyed in the wool racist but we’re not allowed to mention that.

      2. Nigel

        Playing more female artists on the radio will lead to genocide. Flippin’ hell who knew?

        1. Junkface

          You can’t read or ignored my comparison completely. There is a revisionist Left movement happening right now across the western world. This article is directly related to that kind of thinking. The slippery slope has already been jumped on.

          Read history maybe?

          1. Nigel

            Wow I see from my history that women who worked for the civil service had to leave when they got married until 1970 and marital rape didn’t exist until 1990 and women couldn’t own their own home or deny their husbands access to their own savings or get restraining orders against violent partners and generally were not paid the same as men for the same work so I guess the current generation of women CAN strive to be what previous generations weren’t allowed to be! is that revisionism? Or genocide!

          2. Junkface

            Oh Lord! You are daft. Missing the point completely. This is part of something much, much bigger. This kind of thinking, searching for offense, where there is none. As this article above proves, and everyone else’s comments. Music is chosen based on taste, not gender.

            As someone has already pointed out somewhere in the comments. A lot of these male artists are only popular with women. Popularity = sales. Sales = radio play

            Those women are oppressing female artists! Call the puritan police! Arrest them!

            You are probably the only one who goes along with this ridiculous, laughable article.

          3. Nigel

            Literally the only person taking offence, and screaming about incipient genocide, is yourself.

            The question, of course, is what role does gender play in ‘taste,’ a somewhat vague term when it comes to accounting for what mechanisms are at play in deciding which artists get air play, and certainly does not rule out bias, conscious or otherwise.

    2. Termagant

      ” be the known heroes that the past generations of women of Ireland were never allowed to be.”
      I listen to RTE when I’m out in the workshop and I’ve the ear worn off my head hearing about female action heroes from 1916

  20. Nullzero

    The one thing those songs have in common is that they’re all dreadful.

    Whether you’re listening to a male or female artist these days you can be guaranteed you’re listening to garbage.

      1. Nullzero

        Hilarious. Music has been dead for about 20 years at this stage, all we have now is its shuffling undead auto tuned corpse.

  22. Vanessanelle

    I’m not sure what the researchers were either looking for, or what outcomes they were demonstrating from the data, wouldn’t have been interpreted as biased anyway

    Perhaps that’s really the purpose, to open a conversation about Women Performers and Artists and Songwriters getting a equal bite out of the airwaves etc
    and if that is the case, sure lets organise a conference a lay it out bare

    also, I’m not sure specifically limiting it to the Republic of Ireland’s catchment was going to avoid bias risk anyway
    Since both Niall Horan and yer man Kennedy – as well as being more likely to have connecting and related parties, they are particularly familiar to the wider population in that set geo boundary

    The presentation should also carry the user reader information that the reporting period the data was extracted recorded some unusual and heightened activity – say like an album launch
    which in fairness does not happen every year
    Try running that modelling over years that Enya – just as a for instance, dropped an album

    Like when RTE sold off that parcel of land their earnings looked great that year,
    but that type of revenue generation carry on isn’t repeated year in year out

    me just saying s’all

  23. Clampers Outside

    Ever wonder why you hear more of a particular act around the time ticket sales for said act are announced? That’s promoters.

    Promoters promote acts so they can make money regardless of the gender of the act.
    I had a promoter with the biggest clout in the industry as a client for the best part of a decade and they couldn’t give a tuppeny whether the act was male or female as the only thing that mattered were ticket sales, ie profit.

    1. Micko

      Completely agree.

      Same as myself, worked for those lads for a few years. ;-)

      They could care less about gender. Bums on seats is all that matters.

      1. Clampers Outside

        I’m sure you must be laughing as I am at the ludicrous idea that they’d ‘bias’ for a gender at the expense of single red cent!

        hahaha… No chance :0)

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