Make Music Equal is Chartmetric’s data-driven initiative to advance gender equity in the music industry

The good folks at Chartmetric have made their artist pronoun and gender database free for commercial as well as academic use and it’s a gamechanger.

Guest post from Chartmetric

On Women’s Equality Day, we made our artist pronoun and gender database free for commercial and academic use, because we envision an accessible music industry that values a level playing field and strives to give an equal voice to all people.

We envision an accessible music industry that values a level playing field and strives to give an equal voice to all people. That’s why, on Women’s Equality Day (Thursday, Aug. 26), we launched our Make Music Equal initiative, making our artist pronoun and gender database free for commercial and academic use (Creative Commons license).

Our aim with Make Music Equal is to do just that: create transparency around structural inequities across all music business sectors and social media platforms in order to gauge the severity of the inequities that exist in the music industry and determine where energy and resources must be focused to rectify those inequities.

Make Music Equal is much more than just a database; it’s a collaborative hub for artists, businesspeople, academics, social justice advocates, and anyone invested in both equity and the music industry. Ultimately, we hope to foster collaboration with allies globally and throughout all music business sectors (e.g., recorded music, publishing, digital, live, mass media) to reveal previously unseen imbalances in festival lineups, venue bookings, playlist listings, label rosters, charts, and music and social media platforms so that we may begin to hold leaders to account and make music equal.

Our inaugural database features self-defined pronoun and gender data (in addition to genre and artist country data) for 490K+ artists worldwide, and it’s available for download at makemusicequal.chartmetric.com. While the first iteration of our equity initiative will be focused on artist pronouns and gender, future iterations may address other forms of identity (including, but not necessarily limited to, age, ability, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, or religion) and other segments of the music industry.

In short, this is the beginning of a very long journey that we’re fortunate enough to be embarking upon with The Gender Identification Initiative, a coalition of 10 organizations representing 50K women and other under-represented creators actively working to increase both the volume and accuracy of the data being collected and also the visibility and representation of the creators themselves.

To search the database, download the entire dataset, track the distribution of pronouns and gender across all artists, or collaborate on a project with us, visit makemusicequal.chartmetric.com.

If you have any questions or concerns, feel free to reach out to us at equity@chartmetric.com.