For those who are familiar with my articles, you’ll know
that I am a proud feminist. I have spent most of my country-listening life
consuming almost exclusively female artists. That wasn’t a deliberate choice,
but rather one based simply on the music I liked, which sounds and lyrics I
preferred. For me, the women's music was better.

But the country music industry is one that tends to sideline
female artists, particularly in the wake of the newly masculine marketing that
resulted in the ignoring of many female superstars of 10-20 years ago (I
have previously written about this). Despite this, 2013 has seen person
after person claiming this year to be the ‘Year
of the Woman’ (a term I hate, we’re a gender not an animal on a Chinese
calendar). It’s true, there are plenty of female artists coming out the
woodwork and saying something: Ashley
Monroe, Kacey Musgraves, Holly Williams, Pistol Annies. Of course, women making
proficient, insightful music have always been there, it’s just the men of music
journalism ‘discovered’ that women can suddenly do something cute and use their
brains to make intelligent music. Maybe Shania showing her belly during the 90s
made them forget.

My scepticism aside, has all this positive press about women’s
musical abilities over the masculine trend of beer and truck songs actually
affected how they perform in sales and on country radio? Well, the answer is I’m
not sure. For the past month I’ve been collecting data from all 5 of the
Billboard country charts: Hot Country Songs, Country Airplay, Country Digital
Songs, Country Streaming Songs, and Top Country Albums. I have also been paying
general attention to these charts for most of the year so far and let’s be
honest with ourselves; the women everyone is raving about simply aren’t making
the dent in the charts they being built up to make.

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