This is how diversity is in the German charts

On May 31, 2022, the tenth Diversity Day will be celebrated nationwide. To mark the occasion, the French music platform “Qobuz” took on the German charts to check their diversity. For this purpose, all top 20 chart songs since the year 2000 were examined and sorted by gender and genre. Female members of bands were also taken into account. The company found that at 74 percent almost three quarters of the top artists are men and women at 26 percent make up around a quarter of the chart landscape. “Qobuz” also claims to have found that the proportion of women in the charts has reached its “absolute low” in 2021.

An American study was the model

The study is said to have been based on a previous study by the University of Southern California Annenberg. Last year, this would have examined the US chart songs with regard to the gender of their performers. It found that in 2020, only a fifth of all top hits in the US came from women. The values ​​of the past few years would have looked even worse. Inspired by the idea, “Qobuz” analyzed the German charts and came up with similarly low quotas for women.

Lowest quota of women achieved in 2021

Last year only a total of seven percent of the hits from the German top 20 charts were said to have come from women. This value is the lowest that could be determined within the years 2000 to 2021. For the first time, the number fell below ten percent. Only Olivia Rodrigo, Måneskin bassist Victoria De Angelis and rapper Badmómzjay would have made the seven percent quota possible. This means that the charts are backwards in terms of diversity.

The peak of 49 percent women in the charts was recorded in 2002. Singers like Shakira, Nelly Furtado and P!nk kept the quota high, as did girl groups like Las Ketchup with the “Ketchup Song” and the formation No Angels, which emerged from the talent show “Popstars”. The proportion of women was also very high in 2001 and 2010 (39 percent each).

“Talent women need to be heard and supported”

Mark Zisman from “Qobuz” thinks: “There are so many talented women in this world who need to be heard and encouraged”, but men still dominate the music world at the moment. Since the numbers in the music industry are currently deteriorating, on the one hand it is “important that […] Record labels, music studios, festival organizers or concert halls pay attention to an increasing proportion of women,” says the company’s “Head of Music”. In addition and also particularly noteworthy is the fact that “as a music streaming service, we also support female and various artists”. The platform would currently contribute to this with playlists and magazine articles.

Bands used to be more popular

In addition to the women’s and men’s quotas, the study also produced other observations: While songs by bands were still particularly popular at the beginning of the 2000s and in 2005 even 39 percent of all chart hits came from bands, these proportions fell rapidly. At that time, the Sugababes, Ch!pz, Pussycat Dolls, Tokio Hotel and Fettes Brot provided one hit after the other, later between 2014 and 2020 only zero to seven percent of all chart titles came from music groups. In 2021 it was at least ten percent again.

Germans love pop and hip hop

The investigation was also able to identify the genre favored by the Germans. With around 27 percent, i.e. about a quarter of all songs from the charts between 2000 and 2021, pop is at the top. Tracks that have influences from pop music also count among the 27 percent. According to the company, some titles were assigned to several genres if a strict separation was not possible. Behind pop comes hip-hop/rap with 11.6 percent, followed by R&B/soul with 9.7 percent. Folk and pop-rock titles made up the smallest portion of the charts. Probably the most popular artist from the German charts is Ed Sheeran, who was able to place a total of eight of his songs in the top 20.

Most recently, “Qobuz” manager Mareile Heineke notes that there is still room for improvement in the hip-hop industry in terms of diversity: “Six of the eight chart positions in the hip-hop genre were achieved by German rappers, which shows that native hip-hop is most popular in Germany. However: Diversity suffers here too, because even in the top year for hip-hop 2020, no female rapper made it into the German charts.”