Spotify and Smirnoff are teaming up to make music consumers more gender conscious when it comes to their listening habits. This new initiative comes as part of International Women’s Day (Thursday, March 8) and aims to promote gender balance.
The “Smirnoff Equalizer” connects to Spotify to calculate gender breakdown via listening history. As percentages of male and female artists are revealed, music lovers can instantly learn more about their personal listening habits and ultimately achieve a more balanced gender breakdown.
In addition to the stats, Spotify curates a more gender-balanced playlist, especially for users who tend to listen to more male than female musicians. Smirnoff has also paired up with transgender DJ/producer Honey Dijon, who appears on-video in the platform to share her experiences facing gender bias in the music industry. 
For Smirnoff’s Global Senior Brand Manager Neil Shah, this Spotify feature is a no-brainer:
“We developed the Smirnoff Equalizer in partnership with Spotify because we believe that when we get to discover talented women artists and their phenomenal music, we’ll all have a better listening experience.”
In 2017, 100% of Spotify’s top streamed tracks were performed by men. Let’s hope 2018 is a different story.
Check out the new feature via smirnoffequalizer.com.
100% of the top tracks…. er does that mean 100% of the top 50, just the top 2, or in fact just the most streamed artist (top 1)…?
While I totally agree with the sentiment, campaigns are undermined when marketeers use underhanded methods such as this.
Instead of trying to shock with a statistic which doesn’t mean anything specific in reality, why not say 100% of the top 5 or top 10 etc. and be honest?