Cast your mind back to when the nominations were announced for the 2019 Brit Awards. It actually felt like a progressive year for the 43-year-old ceremony: for only the second time in its history, the female nominees outnumbered the men.
But that change didn’t last. This year, there’s not a single woman nominated for the top prizes of British Album of the Year, nor for Best Group.
In the Song of the Year category, among 10 nominations, the only British woman represented is pop singer Mabel, and the only British non-binary person is Sam Smith.
The Brits are meant to be a flagship moment for British music, representing the best of what the UK has to offer to the rest of the world. It’s not as if British men are somehow divinely inspired in a way that women and non-binary people aren’t. So the fact that the awards are still so uneven, in 2020, is unacceptable.
The simplest explanation for the disparity in nominations is that the Brits only nominate artists who have enjoyed Top 40 success. When they announced the nominations, the Brits pre-empted the criticism by saying in a press release: ‘The eligibility list has been compiled by the Official Charts Company and includes artists who have released product and enjoyed top 40 chart success’.
In other words: ‘We only nominate people who chart – it’s not our fault that women haven’t!’
It’s true that there haven’t been many British women in the Top 40 lately for the Brits to choose from. The 40 biggest selling singles of 2019, according to Official Charts data, feature 17 British men, alongside just one British woman, and one British non-binary person.
Meanwhile, of the top 40 biggest selling albums of 2019, only two were made by British women (in comparison to 19 from British men). Of those two, neither were eligible to be nominated for the Brit Awards, as they were released in 2017 and 2018.
That’s the problem with the charts – they’re not only a reflection of the zeitgeist, but also of older trends, and the nostalgic music shopping habits of the boomers who still stock up on CDs. Hence why ABBA, Queen, and Elton John all feature highly on the bestselling albums list. In fact, less than half of the 40 top-selling albums of 2019 were actually released in 2019.
So why are the Brit Awards still clinging on to their rule that music must be in the Top 40 to be nominated? It’s a retrograde way to consider what constitutes ‘success’ – especially when women seem to be locked out of achieving that success at the same level as men.
While this remains the state of play in the British mainstream music industry, the Brits will never be diverse unless it takes some positive action
The relative lack of women in the charts is partly caused by the increasing trend for mainstream pop being created by male producers and DJs. These days it’s becoming more common to see a female singer credited as a guest vocalist on a track by a producer like Calvin Harris or Jax Jones. It’s a rising trend for men to collaborate with women, and with other men, but not for women to collaborate with other women.
The BBC cited this as one of the main reasons there were three times as many men as there were women in the pop charts in 2018.
But it’s not only a case of changing pop norms. There are deeper rooted structural issues in the music industry that have been holding women back for a long time.
Talking to the BBC last year Mabel said, ‘As women, we get moulded into something that we don’t necessarily want to be, whereas as a boy I think you’re encouraged to just sort of figure it out [and] do whatever you want to do.’
Her comments reflect a reality for young women entering a music industry where they face much more sexism than their male counterparts, and where men dominate the behind-the-scenes roles. Men easily outnumber women in leadership roles at all the major record labels, with women making up just 30 per cent of senior music executives. In that (very male) climate, it makes sense that women account for less than 20 per cent of signed musicians.
This disparity is more glaring for women of colour, who are even less represented at a major label level, and who have to cope with racism and colourism as well as sexism when they navigate the industry. In an article for the Guardian on this topic in 2019, Yomi Adegoke questioned why the UK doesn’t have a black female artist as successful as Adele or Jess Glynne. It’s certainly not because of a lack of talent.
While this remains the state of play in the British mainstream music industry, the Brits will never be diverse unless it takes some positive action.
It’s worth casting our minds back to 2016 when the Brit Awards chairman first floated the idea of nominating artists who didn’t achieve Top 40 success.
After facing a chorus of #BritsSoWhite for a lack of grime and rap nominations, Brits chairman Ged Doherty acknowledged in an open letter that it was time for change. He pledged to invite a new load of public figures to vote for the Brit Awards, in order to make the voting panel more diverse.
He also acknowledged that the Brits’ eligibility criteria was a big problem. ‘There are performers… who may not have achieved major chart success but who have attracted large followings,’ he conceded. ‘This, perhaps more than any other factor, has caused the nominations to be seen as unrepresentative.’
While the Brits have made changes to their voting panel, they still haven’t adjusted their criteria to allow that panel to vote for acts that didn’t achieve Top 40 success. One voting academy member noted that this resulted in there being only 26 women to choose from for the Best Female award, while 84 men battled it out for the Best Male award.
This year, it’s worth celebrating that more black artists, including Stormzy and Dave, have now achieved Top 40 sales, and therefore have prestigious nominations. But Doherty’s words still ring true: the awards are still unrepresentative, and will remain so, until they divorce themselves from the stagnant measurement of success that is the Top 40.
The Brits are currently debating other major changes to the format – including scrapping the gendered categories completely, in order to be more inclusive of non-binary artists. While this is a progressive move, it won’t allow for more women and non-binary artists to break through into the nominations unless there is a quota to ensure that they do. In fact, it could even hold them back, given the overwhelming number of men they’re competing against in the Top 40 space.
Another good move might be to follow the Grammys’ lead by increasing the number of nominees in each category. This gives a greater chance that each category will actually represent a spectrum of people and genres.
The Brits could wait for the industry to improve, or it could send a message by providing a high-profile platform for truly exciting artists, judged on merit rather than sales, thereby setting the cultural agenda.
It’s a new decade now, and we shouldn’t be using the outmoded criteria of decades past to judge what is influential in the 2020s.
It’s time the Brits stopped reflecting the status quo of a broken industry, and instead took positive steps to push it forward.
Source: Read Full Article