Festify is one of those fun data-gathering things that bank on people liking to get insights into their special selves. In this case it knocks up a festival poster based on your most played artists.
As an ageing indie kid what likes guitars, my festival was basically David Bowie headlining an All Tomorrow’s Parties line up.
I felt seen. Uncomfortably so.
Then again, one hundred percent yes.
And that’s lovely and all, but for most listeners it’ll look like most festivals – at least in that it features a whole lot of dudes.
That’s not just because you’re a terrible person with unconscious biases against female artists, although that could also be true. You’ll have to examine your own soul on that one. But it’s also because of the way Spotify works generally.
Spotify’s own figures show that the service plays way, way, WAY more male artists than female ones.
For example: while Drake was the #1 artist last year, Ariana Grande was #2. She had about 5,760,000 listens all up, which is stunning until compared with Drake’s eight billion. That’s a difference of more than two billion listens.
And Grande is kind of the outlier. The most played songs were overwhelmingly by dudes: specifically Drake, XXXTENTACION, Ed Sheeran, and Post Malone. Byonce’s turn on J. Balwin’s ‘Mi Genta’ was the first female artist to appear on the list at #6, while Dua Lipa was the first female artist to appear in their own right at #8.
And sure, Spotify plays what you want to listen to. But it only chooses from what it makes available, and if that ends up being more dudes then suddenly your pretendy festival becomes a sausage fest.
You can try it out here, but maybe use it as a spur to cover some of the blind spots your listening habits might have accidentally fossilised. Excuse me while I put PJ Harvey on repeat…
