Music is one of the most popular mediums of entertainment today. Over the past few decades, music has become incredibly accessible. Listeners no longer have to sit next to a record player to consume music, as we can easily find and listen to nearly any music we want due to the emergence of streaming platforms like Spotify and Apple Music. The emergence of the internet has allowed musical artists to build connections and work on collaborative projects more easily than ever, allowing them to reach levels of success that they could never reach on their own.
However, not all artists are equally likely to achieve commercial success in music. This is true regarding Hip Hop and R&B, arguably two of the most frequently listened to genres in North America, as both of these genres have traditionally been dominated by men in the mainstream. In 2022, Cassie McMillan studied the role of gender as it pertains to collaborative tracks in these genres, to determine whether the lesser access of opportunities to commercial success is reflected in collaboration trends in the mainstream.
Data Collection
Mainstream Hip Hop and R&B music was considered by using songs in Billboard’s year-end “hot 100” R&B/Hip Hop charts. For this particular study, all songs between 2012 to 2020 were considered. This produced 733 unique songs, 339 of which were performed by at least two artists. Of these songs, one was excluded because the featured artist consisted of a band with both men and women. Additionally, songs including artists that were produced and released after their death were omitted.
In the social network that was created, each artist represented a node and was classified by being male or female, and collaborations in the network were represented with undirected edges. In summary, the data that was considered for analysis included 284 different music artists with 605 symmetric, collaborative ties.
Analysis
In the data that was considered, men consisted of the overwhelming majority of artists (for every female artist, there were approximately four male artists). Considering men and women separately, the statistics suggests that men tend to be in much more central locations in the network.
Notably, the average degree for a male artist is 4.60, indicating that when considering each artist individually among all of their hit songs from 2012 to 2020, on average, a male artist collaborated with 4.6 artists. This is significantly greater than it is for women, as the average degree for a female artist is 2.91, nearly 2 less artists. Similarly, the average betweenness for a male artist is 333.00, comparing to the average betweenness for a female artists at 156.42. This means that men played a significantly greater role in connecting the overall network. This is despite the relative lack of a difference in gender representation for Grammy winnings and nominations.
Observing a visualization of the network, most of the central positions are occupied by men, while women generally have more positions that are in the peripheries of the network. Though there are a few female artists that occupy highly central positions in the network (i.e. Nicki Minaj), a vast majority of female artists (including very high-profile artists such as Rihanna) occupied peripheral positions in the network.
Conclusion
Even when accounting for the lesser representation in the genres, the data suggests that mainstream female artists in R&B and Hip Hop are also less likely to collaborate with other artists than their male artists, even though there isn’t a significant difference in who is more likely to win awards. The center of the network is where the highest density of collaborative ties are located, and a vast majority of these artists are men. Additionally, the differences in the degrees and betweenness indicate that female artists are also less likely to connect different artists together. This data supports the claim that the differences in representation in R&B and Hip Hop are also reflected in the collaboration patterns of these genres.
References
McMillan, C. “Who run the world?” Gender and the social network of R&B/hip hop collaboration from 2012 to 2020. Appl Netw Sci 7, 69 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41109-022-00485-9