“That girl thinks she’s the queen of the neighborhood” is the first verse of Rebel Girl, a song by the American feminist punk rock band Bikini Hill, which lived its moment of glory in the 90s. The title of that song, and the spirit of protest that encouraged its performers inspired the professor at the University of Alicante, Cande Sánchez-Olmos to address gender inequality in the music industry.
After years of study, together with her colleagues from the Department of Communication and Social Psychology, Tatiana Hidalgo-Marà and Jesús Segarra-Saavedra, she has coordinated a work that studies the situation of women in the music industry in Spain and Latin America -barely analyzed in comparison with the Anglo-Saxon world – and the activism associated with the creation and the predominant messages, “especially those that reach the most, because sometimes we focus on the indie world and forget that there are other songs that reach people the most”, explains the Sánchez-Olmos.
The work, a compendium of studies by different authors, ranges from the presence of female composers in Spanish cinema, very sporadic until the end of the last century, but which today already has a notable presence, to its situation in the field of live music production, where only the female presence in marketing and communication tasks is the majority, but it is still scarce in direction and management tasks.
A fact: the top of decision-making in independent companies is dominated by men in a proportion of 86% compared to 14% of women, a figure that worsens in multinationals, which register an inequality ratio of 89% of men versus 11% women.
In the field of creation, Cande Sánchez-Olmos highlights the difference between the Anglo-Saxon industry, where women dominate the hit and sales lists, and the Spanish industry, where until RosalÃa’s recent emergence it was men who occupied the first positions. In 2022, it was Fito, Alejandro Sanz, Manuel Carrasco and Joan Manuel Serrat who sold the most tickets in Spain.
A study shows that male artists dominate the sales charts in Spain from 2015 to 2020, both in terms of presence, success, and concentration in the top sales. The inequality results in Spain (71% men, 22% women and 7% mixed bands) are considerably worse than those obtained by in Billboard (54.1% men, 41.5% women and 4.5% mixed bands). .
From the point of view of sorority, the work analyzes phenomena as recent as the controversies surrounding last year’s Benidorm Fest, with the choice of Chanel over the proposals of Rigoberta Bandini or Tanxugueiras, or the enormous media impact of the success signed by Shakira and Bizarrap, but he does not forget pioneers such as RocÃo Jurado and Lola Flores, an example of female camaraderie in the face of a market that wanted to confront them, as would later happen with Madonna and Beyoncé.
