Fix The Mix Report: Women & NB Producers Are Lost

The release of the first annual Fix The Mix report has found that women and non-binary producers and engineers are lost in the mix across the music industry. The studies were undertaken in a collaborative effort between We Are Moving the Needle, Jaxsta, Middle Tennessee State University and Howard University, with the findings presented by Emily Lazar, Beth Appleton, Meghan Smyth, Beverly Keel, Carolyn Malachi, Jordan Hamlin, Gabriela Rodriguez Bonilla & Jasmine Kok.

About the Fix The Mix Report

The inaugural Fix The Mix Report examines gender representation among people receiving production and engineering credits across the music industry, specifically as it pertains to women and non-binary technical creators and professionals. It provides an in-depth analysis of those credits, examining both the top-line key roles of producer, engineer, mixing engineer, and mastering engineer, as well as additional production and recording roles including programmer, vocal producer, editor, and assistant roles.

The Fix The Mix report is the first major study of gender representation across all credited production and engineering personnel by role.

This study acknowledges the stalwart and pioneering research conducted by the USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, which released six reports on the music industry spanning from 2012 through 2023. In the January 2023 update, the Annenberg study reported that women account for only 2.8% of all music producers credited across 1,100 songs on the Billboard Hot 100 Year-End Charts from 2012-2022 (Smith et al., 2023, p. 4).

The aforementioned report gives insight to gender representation by looking at 100 songs per year over eleven years. The Fix The Mix report analyzes data from one year (2022) across a total of 1,128 songs (757 top streamed songs, 30 GRAMMY-winning albums, Top 50 songs from the Spotify Billions Playlist, the Top 50 songs from the RIAA Diamond Certified Records List, and a breakdown of technical creator roles by distributor.

Despite the statistic that only 2.8% of music industry producers and engineers are women, this report’s highly detailed examination of representation across different genres, DSP playlists, awards and certifications, reveals that the levels of representation for women and non-binary individuals vary significantly, ranging from 0% to 17.6% in specific sectors.

While some genres of the industry seem to be more inclusive in their hiring practices, it is important to note that even with increased representation, the overall numbers remain alarmingly and unacceptably low.

The Fix The Mix report expands the existing body of knowledge regarding inclusion in the music industry by taking a comprehensive look at top streamed songs, albums, genres, awards, and market share. With this report, the music industry will be able to target its collective efforts toward the areas where action is needed most as well as measure more specifically if progress has been made. This study presents metrics and data-informed strategies in an effort to realize quantifiable change.

Key findings from Fix The Mix

When looking at digital service providers/streaming services, the results showed:

• The credits for the Top 10 streamed tracks of 2022 across five major DSPs reveal a significant gender gap, with only 16 of the 240 credited producers and engineers being women and non-binary people (6.7%).
• Among the DSPs, the Best of 2022 playlists sourced from TikTok and Spotify have the weakest representation of women and non-binary people in technical roles, with only 3.6% and 3.7% in key positions, respectively.
• The top songs on Apple Music have the highest representation of women and non-binary people across DSPs with 8.9% in key positions.
• Analysis of credits in the Top 10 songs across DSPs and genres shows that women and non-binary individuals are more highly concentrated within assistant roles than in key technical roles.
• In all 3 DSPs and 10 genres that report any assistant credits in the dataset (regardless of gender), assistant roles have 12.6 percentage points more women and non-binary people on average than do key technical roles.
• These findings challenge a misconception that women and non-binary individuals lack the qualifications to be hired as producers and engineers. Instead, the data suggests that they are qualified and present in the proper entry-level roles, but they are not advancing to the next level.

When looking at musical genres, the results showed:

• Of all Top 50 songs across 14 genres examined in this report, Metal has the lowest percentage of women and non-binary people credited in key technical roles at 0.0%, with Rap and Christian & Gospel trailing closely at 0.7% and 0.8% respectively. These numbers highlight the need for major advancements across the cultures of these genres’ recording communities.
• Looking deeper at the Top 50 Rap songs, women and non-binary people hold technical credits in just four of the songs, amounting to 1.3% of all technical credits in the chart. This means men hold 98.7% of all technical credits in Rap’s Top 50 songs of 2022.
• Of the 14 genres in this report, Electronic stands out for its relatively high representation of women and non-binary people in producer roles, accounting for 17.6% of all producer credits on the Top 50 songs of 2022. Folk & Americana is close behind at 16.4%. When considering both key technical roles of producer and engineer, Folk & Americana arguably has the best gender representation, as it holds the second highest percentage for women and non-binary people in both producer roles and engineering roles. Looking at how women and non-binary people show up in engineer credits, Folk & Americana (6.4%) is second only to R&B (7.2%).

When looking at the 65^th Grammy Awards, the results showed:

• Of all of the 65th GRAMMY award-winning albums in the 28 “best in genre” categories examined in this report, 17 albums credit zero women or non-binary people in the key technical roles of producer and engineer (including recording, mixing, and mastering engineers).
• A total of eight projects list producer credits for women and non-binary producers (11.5% of all producers), and three projects list engineer credits for women and non-binary engineers (3.9% of all engineers). The total number of women and non-binary people credited for technical roles is 19, out of 249 total (7.6%).
• Across the eight GRAMMY Award categories that honour technical roles, only one woman was recognised and thirty men were recognized in technical roles. This woman was awarded Producer of the Year, Classical, which means that the four albums and two songs celebrated by tech-focused categories all credited zero women or non-binary people on the projects.

When looking at the top records by consumption, the results showed:

• Out of the Top 50 songs of the RIAA Diamond certification list there are a total of 248 key technical roles credited. Of those, 244 (98.4%) are credited to men and four (1.6%) are credited to women and non-binary people. Of those four women and non-binary people, three are producers and one is an engineer. Two of the three producer credits happen to be for the main artist of the respective songs: Lady Gaga for “Bad Romance” and Mariah Carey for “All I Want for Christmas is You”.
• The credits for the Spotify Billions Club playlist’s 50 most-streamed songs reveal that women and non-binary people represent 2.0% of key technical roles across the list. Only five of the 50 tracks credit any women or non-binary people in key technical roles (1 credit per song). Three of these credits are for engineers (1.8% of all engineers), and two are for producers (2.1% of all producers). One of these two producer credits is for that track’s main artist, as is one of the three engineer credits.

Emily Lazar, Grammy Award-winning mastering engineer and founder of We Are Moving The Needle said:

“This study confirms what I’ve known after spending decades behind the board in the recording studio – women are not being given the same opportunities as men in production and engineering roles.

Ensuring that there is more gender and racial diversity among music’s creators is not actually a complex problem if you want to solve it. The most important step is for artists and record labels to be able to hire from a more diverse pool of producers, mixers, and engineers, but it’s exceedingly hard to hire people when you can’t find them.

We hope this report will give decision makers the motivation and tools they need to make real change in their hiring practices so we can achieve gender parity in production, engineering and mastering roles.”

View the full Fix The Mix Report

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