Today, we released our 2025 Make Music Equal report—an in-depth analysis powered by our ongoing pronoun tracker and dataset. Drawing from over 1 million self-declared artist pronouns as a proxy for gender representation, the report breaks down gains and persistent disparities across the music industry into 10 bite-sized, shareable insights.
Key Findings:
- Out of 1M+ artists in the Make Music Equal dataset, about 728,000 are solo acts. Among them: 79% use he/him, 18% use she/her, and 3% use they/them or other pronouns
- Among the top 100 artists by Chartmetric Score, 33% now use she/her, up from 26% in 2020
- TV syncs are nearly balanced between men (29%) and women (26%), while film and video games lean more male, with 15% and 6% of releases coming from women, respectively
- Festival slots for women rose 3% since the pre-pandemic era, partially driven by a decline in band bookings
- Band-released tracks also dropped nearly 8%, making room for solo artists—especially women (+2%) and men (+5%)
- Women are underplayed in genres like country and hip-hop, but dominate in R&B and soul, outperforming men by millions of radio airplay spins
- Female fandom is fueling success, particularly among top-performing artists
For more information about our ongoing Make Music Equal initiative and publicly accessible pronoun dataset, head to makemusicequal.chartmetric.com.
