Narrative

Female Solo Artist Representation

The line plot above shows the proportion of solo artists by gender in the Billboard Hot 100 from 1958 to 2024. Between 1960 and the early 1980s, there is a noticeable increase in the proportion of female solo artists. This trend coincides with the rise of the second wave of feminism, which began in the early 1960s and lasted until the early 1980s and focused on issues such as equality in the workplace, reproductive rights, and challenging traditional gender roles. It was also around this time that influential female artists such as Aretha Franklin, Janis Joplin, and Diana Ross emerged and secured platforms to advocate for women’s rights and empowerment. Their success can be seen as both a reflection of and a contributor to the growing feminist movement. The music of these artists often contained themes of empowerment and independence (e.g. Lesley Gore’s “You Don’t Own Me” in 1963), resonating with the societal shifts and changing roles of women.

Intersectionality

In 1989, Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term "intersectionality" to describe how overlapping social identities such as race, gender, and class create unique experiences of oppression and privilege, emphasizing the need for an inclusive approach to social justice. Bearing this in mind, we aimed to expand our analyses to explore artists’ intersectional identities. Crucially, in addition to data on artists’ gender, we found data on the Billboard Hot 100 artists’ demographic groups intersecting gender and race, albeit within a more current time frame. 

Ranking

The graph reveals trends and patterns shaped by artist’s intersectional identities of race and gender over time. On the y-axis, smaller numbers (toward the top) indicate higher rankings. Black female artists exhibit significant variability but generally improve over time, notably from 2014 onwards, suggesting resilience and breaking barriers despite compounded racial and gender biases. Black male artists show steadier patterns, benefiting from the broader acceptance of hip-hop and rap, with stable mid-50s rankings in recent years. White female artists generally perform well, reflecting broader market appeal and industry support. However, a decline around 2016-2018 suggests shifts in audience preferences. White male artists demonstrate the most variation, indicating volatility influenced by diverse genre participation and market trends.

The data underscores the persistent challenges and gradual progress for black female artists in a male-dominated industry. Their improving rankings suggest positive shifts toward inclusivity, yet significant disparities highlight ongoing barriers. The steadier performance of black male artists points to the cultural dominance of certain genres, while the fluctuating rankings of white male and female artists reflect broader market dynamics.

Overall, while the data reveals positive trends for black female artists, it also highlights the need for continued efforts towards equity and inclusivity in the music industry. The variations among demographic groups illustrate how race and gender intersect to influence artistic success, with market trends and audience preferences playing significant roles.

Furthermore, we investigated the lyrical themes of the songs based on artists’ intersectional identities, seeking to understand how different demographic backgrounds influence musical expression.

Topic Analysis

The topic proportions across different demographic categories reveal significant variations that relate to intersectionality and feminism. For instance, Topic 1, characterized by words like "love," "know," "baby," and "girl," dominates among black female (52.07%) and white female artists (67.27%), as well as white male artists (65.46%). This focus on themes of love and relationships may reflect societal norms that emphasize emotional expression in women’s narratives. 

In contrast, black male artists show a more balanced topic distribution, with 28.47% in Topic 2, featuring words like "nigga," "bitch," "shit," and "money." This suggests a stronger presence of themes related to socioeconomic struggles and assertive masculinity, reflecting historical contexts where black male voices often address identity, power, and survival.

These findings highlight the intersectional nature of music, where race and gender intersect to shape lyrical themes. For female artists, the emphasis on relational themes can reflect traditional gender roles but also provide a platform for asserting personal experiences and agency. The aggressive and financially-focused themes among black male artists underscore the intersection of racial and gender-based oppression, emphasizing resilience and resistance against systemic challenges.

Overall, the analysis shows how different groups navigate and express their identities through music, illustrating the importance of considering multiple social categories to understand the complexities of artistic expression and its connection to broader social dynamics.

Words

We further examined the songs’ lyrics to explore the interrelation between music and culture, zooming in on some representative lexicons. We focused on three vocabulary groups: profane words, substance-related words, and big-name brands / capitalistic words.

Profanity 

Societal changes may also be reflected in norms around propriety and reflected in music. The below graph shows frequencies of a selection of common profanity for Spotify and the Billboard Hot 100.

One of the most visible features of the graphs is that the Spotify data has sudden, drastic spikes on the left. This is due to the low numbers of songs released in those years on Spotify—no year before 1966 has more than a single-digit number of songs—and so the results can be disregarded as statistical anomalies. Additionally, this can also be attributed to the initial pure negative outlook on profanity in music during this time. This is illustrated by the actions of worried parents like Tipper Gore, former U.S. President Al Gore’s wife, who advocated for the “banning” of explicit music due to its potential negative influence, which was ultimately unsuccessful (Parris). Otherwise, we see a consistent, gradual increase in the frequencies of all selected words over time. On the other hand, the Billboard Hot 100 had virtually none of these words until after 1990, and afterward vary widely but generally trend upwards. 

Substance-related Words 

These graphs show mentions of various drugs in the lyrics of songs for the Billboard Hot 100 and Spotify, respectively. As mentioned above, Spotify has major spikes on the left to disregard. Another notable feature is a specific increase in uses of the word “smoke” in the mid to late 1990s shared between the two. Naturally, there are unrelated uses of the word, but since they occur for a variety of unpredictable reasons, we expect this factor to be random and relatively constant throughout, and this peak readily distinguishes itself from the surrounding noise. It coincides with both a large jump in the frequency of depictions and positive references of smoking in film (Rose), and an increase in smoking among high school students in the United States (CDC). 

Brands