Explore Fair MusE Data

Artists

Text that gives context to the visuals

A slice’s label represents the most common “main genres”. Music genre labels on our database are annotated with the format “main genre: subgenre”. The figure shows only main genres because subgenres lack standardization:

  • Many tracks lack genre labels (~45%).
  • Multiple labels may represent the same subgenre (e.g., “chanson française” and “french chanson”), failing to accurately represent an aggregate of similar tracks.
  • Sometimes music genre labels are too broad and group entire styles into one category (e.g., “r&b, funk & soul”).
  • “Rock”, “pop”, and “electronic” represent 50% of the tracks. The following 20% is composed of “alternative” (~10%), “hip-hop & rap” (~7%), and “r&b, funk, & soul” (~5%). All remaining main genres constitute less than 5% of the music in our database.

Around 400k tracks are grouped into “other” because they represent less than 2% of tracks.

Only solo artists are represented, as a gender attribute for groups or orchestras is not applicable. There is an overrepresentation of male artists (~70%) to female artists (~20%), while around 40% of artists in Spotify identify as women.

LGTBQ+ gender definitions (including labels such as non-binary, androgynous, gender fluid, etc.) are a small minority. ~7% of artists without a designated gender label are marked as “N/A”.

The figure shows that 70% are either solo artists (person, 50%) or groups (20%). There are 20% of artists in our database that lack a proper type label, marked as N/A (20%).

To obtain the top twenty positions, we first ranked the total number of listens in the whole database. However, since avid listeners bias this ranking (a single donor may be overrepresented), a second ranking of artists was made by grouping donors.

All artists in this top 20 come from commonwealth countries:

  • 12 (60%) are  from the United Kingdom.
  • 6 (30%) are from the United States of America.
  • 1 (5%) is from Canada.
  • 1 (5%) is from New Zealand.

The data includes 12 solo artists: 6 female, 6 male, and 8 groups. 

The figure is a histogram showing the number of artists on the y-axis (log scale) over 5-years on the x-axis. It shows data from 1700 to 2025:

  • 238 artists before the year 1700 were excluded for visualization purposes.
  • 1 artist was excluded because its birthdate field was set to 2198.
  • Artists without any birthdate/formation date information are also excluded from the chart.

The figure shows that groups became an important part of the dataset after 1920 and continued increasing in number, while the number of solo artists decreases steadily, most likely because artists born in the year 2000 are starting their musical careers.

  • The third most important type of artist are orchestras.
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