Last year, The Brit Awards made the contested decision to award gender neutral prizes, a championed step forwards for non-binary people as well as changing the way we consume and judge music critically. However, this step was stopped in its tracks this year as all of the Artist of the Year nominees are male.
There were concerns over female and non-binary sidelining when the gender-neutral awards were put in place, but the public quickly eased with Adele and Little Simz nominated for best artist in early 2022. Instead, the complacency of The Brits performative change has come back to punish the artists it is supposed to include. A Brits spokesperson said “while it’s disappointing there are no nominations in the artist of the year category, we also have to recognise that 2022 saw fewer high profile women artists in cycle with major releases”. T
Thinly, this could have possibly been excused as a solitary occurrence, but the spokesperson continues to say “as was the case in 2021”. The Brits are very aware of this pattern it seems, and use it as an excuse to still have only 1/5 nominees for album of the year being female, women having only 42% of nominations overall, let alone the lack of recognition for non-binary artists beyond the performative renaming of awards. The men nominated for best artist (Harry Styles, Stormzy etc.) are certainly deserving, but not at the expense of equally deserving women and non-binary artists.
The problem is deep rooted through the music industry. Non binary people and women, respectively, make up only 2% and 20% of artists signed to a major UK label. Furthermore, labels cannot seem to handle their careers and marketing past a certain point. Mabel went from best female in 2020 to no nominations in 2022. Her album was badly promoted, and she ended up changing to Dua Lipa’s former management a month after release. So, not only are the voting academy not choosing women and non binary artists, they’ve not got many to choose from. Furthermore, to be eligible for artist of the year an artist must have achieved at least one top 40 album or two top 20 singles. Of the 70 artists eligible, 12 were women. The Brits can claim that this is no fault of their own, but as a cultural institution they have a duty to rid the music industry of sexism and support the incredibly talented artists across the country that deserve the same recognition (or better) than their male counterparts.
Renaming awards is all that has been done. No change in the system or ‘cycle’. The Brits still rarely ever reveal the gender percentage of their voting body, a fact that makes anyone suspicious. Emily Maddick, who sat on the voting panel this cycle, has argued that we need to bring back female-specific categories for the sake of equality, however that makes very little difference at all to the system itself; only giving the impression of successful women in the music industry. The fact of the matter is, the current industry exploits artists that aren’t men, and keeps them from reaching the same level of success out of yes, sexism, but the institutional negligence of which The Brits have become the poster child of this month. To truly take steps forward, we don’t just need more support for female and non binary artists through the current cycle, but a real change in the way the industry works. The Brits have an opportunity to make this change, and this year they voted not to.
Image “File:2008 Brit Awards Earls Court Centre.jpg” by Stanley Wood from London, UK is licensed under CC BY 2.0.