News March 8, 2018

Spotify now tells you how gender-diverse your music taste is

Today is International Women’s Day, so as you can imagine, there’s currently plenty of talk going on about fighting issues faced by women, and striving for diversity and equal representation in the media. Now, Spotify have also got in on the action, launching a new service to tell you how gender-diverse your music taste is.

With plenty of discussion about how women are under-represented in the world of music (whether it be on the radio, festival lineups, etc.), many are searching for solutions on how to fix this. With triple j currently broadcasting an all-female lineup of programs today, Spotify are now doing their bit, attempting to educate users on how equal their listening habits are.

Teaming up with Smirnoff, Spotify have launched the ‘Smirnoff Equalizer’, which analyses your music taste, and then lets you know what percentage of the artists you’ve listened to in the last six months were male and female.

The logic behind it is pretty solid though, with Spotify’s 2017 Year In Music featuring a distinct lack of female acts. The stats revealed that out of the ten most-streamed songs globally, none of them were by female artists, meaning that it’s a little bit one-sided.

So how do they plan to make the playing field a little bit more equal? Well, illustrating listener habits is a pretty good way to do so.

To use the ‘Smirnoff Equalizer’, head along to the website and connect your Spotify account. Once you’ve done so, you’ll be given an idea of how diverse your listening habits are, before Spotify gives you the ability to change that to create “a more balanced listening experience.”

Using a small slider on the screen, you can choose whether you’d like your music taste to be an even 50/50 split between male and female artists, or if you’d like a bit more female representation included. Whatever you choose, Spotify will then fix up your playlist to mirror this choice, meaning that you can easily start making your listening habits a little more equal.