Mickey Guyton, Brandi Carlile, Leslie Fram Discuss Gender Inequality On Country Radio With Samantha Bee

Brandi Carlile on Full Frontal with Samantha Bee.

This week, Full Frontal with Samantha Bee highlighted the ongoing struggles of female country artists to earn airplay on country radio.

Samantha Bee visited Nashville to meet up with several artists, including Brandi Carlile, Mickey Guyton, Margo Price and Tanya Tucker, as well as CMT’s Leslie Fram, who each offered their perspectives.

“Radio is still king so I feel like we are training people not to hear female voices,” Fram said.

They offered insights from Jada E. Watson’s “Gender Representation on Country Format Radio” study, which stated that in 2000, 67% of artists represented in the country format were men, while 33% were females. In the past eight years, there has been a 66% decline in music heard by female artists on country radio; in 2018, male artists performed 89% of the music heard on country radio, with only 11% of the radio format’s music coming from female artists.

“I wrote a song called ‘Pay Gap,’ and that’s exactly what it’s about,” said Price. “That lost me a lot of those mainstream country fans that I had. I was blacklisted by a lot of those [mainstream label] people because my music talked about real life problems. They just didn’t like what I liked to say. But there are people in rural America who need to hear these songs, especially young women.”

Guyton offered insight on questions of race and gender in country music.

“Black people love country music and there are so many people who look like me that love country music and that’s what I’m here to do. We’re really just paving the way. We deserve to have our time here,” Guyton said.

“There is really no one person you can point a finger at,” Carlile said. “Anyone that listens to country music, anyone who loves country music, despite where you fall on the political spectrum or who it is you are, ask yourself this question, which is what do you want her daughter to know about herself? And if you can’t get that from country music, if you can’t get that from country radio, it’s a problem.”

Watch the video below:

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Jessica Nicholson

Jessica Nicholson serves as the Managing Editor for MusicRow magazine. Her previous music journalism experience includes work with Country Weekly magazine and Contemporary Christian Music (CCM) magazine. She holds a BBA degree in Music Business and Marketing from Belmont University. She welcomes your feedback at jnicholson@musicrow.com.

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