skip to main content
US FlagAn official website of the United States government
dot gov icon
Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.
https lock icon
Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( lock ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

Explore Research Products in the PAR
It may take a few hours for recently added research products to appear in PAR search results.


Title: Gender Differences in the Global Music Industry: Evidence from Music Brainz and The Echo Nest
With digital music consumption being at an all-time high, online music encyclopedia like MusicBrainz and music intelligence platforms like The Echo Nest are becoming increasingly important in identifying, organizing, and recommending music for listeners around the globe. As a byproduct, such sites collect comprehensive information about a vast amount of artists, their recorded songs, institutional support, and the collaborations between them. Using a unique mash-up of crowdsourced, curated, and algorithmically augmented data, this paper unpacks an unsolved problem that is key to promoting artistic innovation, i.e., how gender penetrates into artistic context leading to the globally perceived gender gap in the music industry. Specifically, we investigate gender-related differences in the sonic features of artists’ work, artists’ tagging by listeners, their record label affiliations, and collaboration networks. We find statistically significant disparities along all these dimensions. Moreover, the differences allow models to reliably identify the gender of songs’ creators and help elucidate the role of cultural and structural factors in sustaining inequality. Our findings contribute to a better understanding of gender differences in music production and inspire strategies that could improve the recognition of female artists and advance gender equity in artistic leadership and innovation.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1755873
PAR ID:
10148343
Author(s) / Creator(s):
;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Proceedings of the Thirteenth International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM2019)
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. ; ; (, International Symposium on Music Information Retrieval)
    null (Ed.)
    Most commercial music services rely on collaborative filtering to recommend artists and songs. While this method is effective for popular artists with large fanbases, it can present difficulties for recommending novel, lesser known artists due to a relative lack of user preference data. In this paper, we therefore seek to understand how content-based approaches can be used to more effectively recommend songs from these lesser known artists. Specifically, we conduct a user study to answer three questions. Firstly, do most users agree which songs are most acoustically similar? Secondly, is acoustic similarity a good proxy for how an individual might construct a playlist or recommend music to a friend? Thirdly, if so, can we find acoustic features that are related to human judgments of acoustic similarity? To answer these questions, our study asked 117 test subjects to compare two unknown candidate songs relative to a third known reference song. Our findings show that 1) judgments about acoustic similarity are fairly consistent, 2) acoustic similarity is highly correlated with playlist selection and recommendation, but not necessarily personal preference, and 3) we identify a subset of acoustic features from the Spotify Web API that is particularly predictive of human similarity judgments. 
    more » « less
  2. ; ; ; ; ; ; ; (, International Society of Learning Sciences)
    Attracting students to computing is crucial for advancing the development of new skills and fostering positive attitudes toward the field, especially among females and minoritized populations. One promising approach involves integrating computing with artistic activities, such as music. This study examines how learner’s prior experiences influence their participation in a virtual summer camp on coding with music. The study also examines how participation in the camp influences participants' attitudes about computing, with an eye toward gender differences. Data were collected through participant surveys (N=73) and focus groups (N=48). Findings suggest that parents’ and guardians' involvement is crucial for participation and integrating coding with artistic work holds promise for attracting students to the field. Findings can inform possible paths to engaging students in computing. 
    more » « less
  3. ; ; ; ; ; ; (, International Society of the Learning Sciences Annual Meeting (ISLS))
    Attracting students to computing is crucial for advancing the development of new skills and fostering positive attitudes toward the field, especially among females and minoritized populations. One promising approach involves integrating computing with artistic activities, such as music. This study examines how learner’s prior experiences influence their participation in a virtual summer camp on coding with music. The study also examines how participation in the camp influences participants' attitudes about computing, with an eye toward gender differences. Data were collected through participant surveys (N=73) and focus groups (N=48). Findings suggest that parents’ and guardians' involvement is crucial for participation and integrating coding with artistic work holds promise for attracting students to the field. Findings can inform possible paths to engaging students in computing. 
    more » « less
  4. ; ; ; ; ; ; ; (, International Society of Learning Sciences, (ISLS))
    Attracting students to computing is crucial for advancing the development of new skills and fostering positive attitudes toward the field, especially among females and minoritized populations. One promising approach involves integrating computing with artistic activities, such as music. This study examines how learner’s prior experiences influence their participation in a virtual summer camp on coding with music. The study also examines how participation in the camp influences participants' attitudes about computing, with an eye toward gender differences. Data were collected through participant surveys (N=73) and focus groups (N=48). Findings suggest that parents’ and guardians' involvement is crucial for participation and integrating coding with artistic work holds promise for attracting students to the field. Findings can inform possible paths to engaging students in computing. 
    more » « less
  5. ; ; ; (, Music Perception)
    null (Ed.)
    Although people across multiple cultures have been shown to experience music narratively, it has proven difficult to disentangle whether narrative dimensions of music derive from learned extramusical associations within a culture or from less experience-dependent elements of the music, such as musical contrast. Toward this end, two experiments investigated factors contributing to listeners’ narrative engagement with music, comparing the narrative experiences of Western and Chinese instrumental music for listeners in two suburban locations in the United States with those of listeners living in a remote rural village in China with different patterns of musical exposure. Supporting an enculturation perspective where learned extramusical associations (i.e., Topicality) play an important role in narrative perceptions of music, results from the first experiment show that for Western listeners, greater Topicality, rather than greater Contrast, increases narrative engagement, as long as listeners have sufficient exposure to its patterns of use within a culture. Strengthening this interpretation, results for the second experiment, which directly manipulated Topicality and Contrast, show that reducing an excerpt’s Topicality, but not its Contrast reduces listeners’ narrative engagement. 
    more » « less
  • Citation Formats
  • MLA
  • APA
  • Chicago
  • BibTeX
  • Save / Share this Record
  • Send to Email