Two Metrics Rising Female Country Artists Have in Common
Lainey Wilson and Megan Moroney are among the rising female country artists paving the way for greater gender equality among country music audiences.
Two Metrics Rising Female Country Artists Have in Common
by Danny Katz via Chartmetric Blog
Country music has never been more popular than it was in 2024, with the genre enjoying a record-breaking year in both numbers and cultural influence. On Spotify’s year end report, they measured a 20% global increase in country streams compared to 2023.
Shaboozey’s “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” and Dasha’s “Austin (Boots Stop Workin’)” dominated TikTok, racking up millions of views and leading Shaboozey’s hit to spend 19 weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, tying the record the longest run in history. On top of that, global superstars Post Malone and Beyoncé made their forays into the genre with their respective albums, F-1 Trillion and Act II: Cowboy Carter.
Despite these huge headlines, the largest long term impact is coming from the solidification of country music’s new class of women: Lainey Wilson, Megan Moroney, Ella Langley, and Dasha. Despite the genre’s long history of being dominated by male voices, these four women have carved their own lanes to stardom.
They have even overtaken long established stars like Carrie Underwood and Miranda Lambertin popularity. This is illustrated below by charting these artists’ Spotify Popularity over time. This metric is a 0-100 score which reflects how popular an artist is compared to all other artists on the platform based on a few factors including number of plays, recency, share of total plays, user engagement, and skip rate. The higher the score, the more an artist is “trending” at that time.
This new class is led by Louisiana native Lainey Wilson, known as one of the hardest workers in Nashville, who went from living in a camper to becoming the first woman to win CMA Entertainer of the Year since Taylor Swift in 2011.
Megan Moroney burst onto the scene with “Tennessee Orange” which quickly climbed the charts and became her first number one on country radio. Since then, she has steadily released new music to feed her rapidly expanding fanbase which grew from ~2.5 million Spotify Monthly Listeners at the start of 2023 to almost 9 million at the end of 2024.
Next is Ella Langley, whose career soared to new heights when she released the infectious “You Look Like You Love Me” featuring fellow Alabama native Riley Green. Fueled by huge engagement on TikTok, it became the first and only song by a female artist to go number one on the Billboard Country Airplay chart in 2024.
Finally, Dasha rounds out the group. She broke out with the previously highlighted “Austin (Boots Stop Workin’),” which has been featured in almost 700K TikTok videos and generated 5.5 billion views to date.
Clearly, Carrie Underwood, Miranda Lambert, Kelsea Ballerini, and Carly Pearce remain very popular acts in their own right. However, two key areas explain how the new class leapfrogged the more established acts: audience demographics and social media engagement. These areas also leave clues as to which artists may be next to make the leap.
Balanced Audience Demographics
Country music, especially with its growing relevance, has an increasingly wide range of both artists and fans. This manifests itself in the audience demographics of each artist, which can be measured through the gender ratio of their social channels. Plotted below is a comparison of the percentage of Instagram followers versus YouTube subscribers by that artist’s gender.
The vast majority of female artists are in the upper right quadrant with greater than 50% of their audience on both platforms being female. There are only four with a majority male audience on Instagram (one being Ella Langley) and three with a majority male audience on YouTube. The split between genders is even greater for TikTok audiences.
Nevertheless, there are some acts that have closer to a 50-50 gender split on both Instagram and YouTube, most notably the new class of female stars. When isolating for the top twenty female artists based on Spotify Popularity and plotting that metric against each act’s delta from a completely neutral balanced gender demographic, a pattern emerges for both platforms.
On Instagram, Lainey Wilson, Megan Moroney, Ella Langley, and Dasha have a gender split within 20% of 50-50. Wilson’s audiences are the closest to neutral, with her Instagram followers being 54% female and 46% male. Of the four, Langley has the largest variance, but as previously mentioned, her followers actually skew more male (only 30% female and 70% male).
In contrast, Carrie Underwood, Miranda Lambert, Kelsea Ballerini, and Carly Pearce all had female percentage deltas of 21% or greater, with Lambert coming in with the most lopsided audience: 82% female and 16% male. Albeit a very small sample size, there is a statistically significant relationship present between a more gender-balanced Instagram audience and higher Spotify Popularity.
A very similar relationship exists between Spotify Popularity and the delta of YouTube audience versus a 50-50 split amongst the top female artists.
The cohort of Underwood, Lambert, Ballerini, and Pearce are more established artists with larger fanbases, but the younger group is appealing to relatively more men than their counterparts. And in some cases, more men total.
Plotted above is the number of Instagram and YouTube followers / subscribers for the artists in these cohorts distributed by gender. Carrie Underwood is excluded as her 13+ million followers significantly skew the axis. This view illuminates the discrepancy in the number of male fans.
For example, Lainey Wilson has 51% more male Instagram followers than Miranda Lambert, despite having only 60% of total followers. Wilson also has 122k more male followers than Kelsea Ballerini, but 1.3 million less overall. Moroney and Langley both have ~65% of the number of male followers of Lambert, despite having only 32% and 17% of Lambert’s total followers, respectively. A similar pattern exists on YouTube, which given its functionality as a streaming service for many, directly reflects listenership.
The wider the audience an artist can appeal to, the larger the audience has the potential to grow over time. For women in country music, the data shows capturing more of the male audience can be an important factor for explosive growth on the path to superstardom.
Social Media Engagement Rates
The other metric where this new class of women stands out is social media engagement rates. Measured by Chartmetric as the average number of likes over their last 30 posts divided by followers, it directly measures how active and interested an artist’s following is in their content. While it becomes increasingly difficult to maintain a high engagement rate as a following grows, the most popular artists can do it.
The figure above visualizes Instagram engagement rate for the top 250 country acts by gender, inclusive of duos and groups, by comparing the metric’s numerator to denominator (average likes to followers). Each point varies in size to reflect the engagement rate.
Carrie Underwood has a massive following (over 13M followers), but only averages ~24K likes per post (0.25% engagement rate). Megan Moroney averages 10.5x more likes than Underwood, despite having just 12% of her total following. This equates to an engagement rate of 16.5% for Moroney, which is the highest for any country artist with over 75K followers.
Lainey Wilson and Ella Langley also boast impressive engagement rates of 3.3% and 9.0% respectively, with Wilson averaging almost 100K likes per post. This ranks her ninth out of all country artists in the dataset. Not surprisingly, the numbers are similar on TikTok.
Plotted in the same manner with the larger points indicating higher engagement rates, many of the same artists separate themselves including Lainey Wilson and Megan Moroney. The new act that stands out is Gabriella Rose, who has a whopping 59% engagement rate (more on her later).
Wilson and Moroney both average ~200K likes per post for engagement rates of 7.0% and 10.7% respectively. Ella Langley averages 78K likes, a few thousand more than Kelsea Ballerini, with only 1.2 million followers to Ballerini’s 2.6 million.
Similar to seeing a positive relationship between balanced gender demographics and Spotify Popularity, the same exists with engagement rates on both Instagram and TikTok.
On Instagram, Wilson, Moroney, Langley, and Dasha all have higher engagement rates (2.5% – 16.5%) than Underwood, Lambert, Ballerini, and Pearce (0.25% – 1.8%) along with greater Spotify Popularity values. On TikTok, Ballerini beats out Dasha in engagement rate at 2.8% versus 0.87%, but Wilson, Moroney, and Langley all far exceed those numbers with rates ranging from 6.5% to 10.7%.
These high engagement rates across both platforms reflect fans who are going to tell their friends about that artist, buy a ticket for a live show, and, as the data shows, stream their music. Make no mistake, Wilson, Moroney, Langley, and Dasha have a long way to go before they match the legendary careers of those who came before them, especially Carrie Underwood and Miranda Lambert.
However, right now the genre has the strongest core of female stars that it’s had since the 1990s. This is extremely encouraging, especially for aspiring female artists who can now see a clearer path to breaking through thanks to the new class of country women.
The Next Artist To Watch – Gabriella Rose
One artist that shares comparable characteristics is Gabriella Rose, a near outlier on the list of artist TikTok engagement rates at 59%. This is based on her average of ~464k likes over her last 30 posts with only 789k followers — the majority generated through her viral track “Doublewide.”
Self-described as a “ridiculous” song, similar to how Ella Langley’s “You Look Like You Love Me” was initially written as a joke, the track has racked up almost 60 million views on her videos alone plus 7+ million Spotify streams to date.
When digging further into her numbers, the similarities with Wilson, Moroney, and Langley really come into focus. While data on her YouTube audience is not yet available, she has a relatively balanced gender distribution of Instagram followers at 62% female and a higher share of female followers on TikTok at 77%. These values, when plotted alongside Spotify Popularity and Chartmetric Score, paint a clear picture of an artist that profiles very similarly.
Regardless of what happens with TikTok’s future in the US, All signs point to Gabriella Rose being an important artist to watch in 2025, who is one of hopefully many that will follow in the footsteps of Wilson, Moroney and Langley with highly engaged, better balanced audiences. As a rising tide lifts all boats, having more women in country music see success is going to unlock even more opportunities for those in the future. That is not only great for women in country, but the genre as a whole.
