With the Brit Awards 2023 quickly approaching, the winner of the best artist award has already been made apparent. The winner will be a man. Nominations for this years ceremony has been released and has received widespread backlash because of their male only best artist list. Where are the women?
Last year, the Brit Awards scrapped their male and female awards in order to favour a more gender-neutral prize. However, this seems to have snubbed women the opportunity of even being short-listed for the award. The long list for the award is created when record labels put forward artists for the prize, voters then choose their top five in order of preference which conducts the short list.
This years nominees are:
- Harry Styles
- George Ezra
- Stormzy
- Central Cee
- Fred Again
To be eligible, artists must achieve at least one top 40 album or two top 40 singles. Some of the women artists who were eligible for the award but missed out included:
- Florence + the Machine
- Charli XCX
- Mabel
- Rina Sawayama
- Ella Henderson
When The Brits announced their plan to move towards gender neutral awards, concerns that women risked being sidelined were eased in 2022 when Adele and Little Simz were nominated for best artist. Alongside female-fronted acts won 10 of the 15 awards of the night.
It appears that this year however has taken one step forward in gender inclusive labelling of awards but five step backwards in the lack of gender representation for the nominees of the award. Since the backlash, The Brits have explained that although it is disappointing that no women are up for nomination the reason behind this is because there was fewer high profile women artists with major releases in 2022.
Where are the women? If anything this years nomination shows a wider systematic issue in the music industry. Depending on record labels for the names of nominees unfairly puts women artists at a disadvantage as only 20% of the artists signed to major UK record labels are female. This means that independent artists and their work is overshadowed alongside women are significantly outnumbered to being recognised.
The sad fact is that voters then have a very small pool of female artists to choose from. Surely in 2023, The Brits should look towards enabling a better representation of gender nominations in their short lists that move beyond changing the title of an award that creates an illusion of inclusion.