How Music Treats Women
Madonna and Don Mclean sang about “the day the music died.” While music hasn’t died, it has certain changed. Music has been commercialized, and it has become quite the profitable business. Gone are the days of artistic expression. They’ve given way to the era of the bottom dollar. This music industry is dominated by men. The artists, managers, and executives are all mostly males. They target other males as their primary consumers, and everything revolves around that fact. The easiest way to market a product is with sex, and since these industry’s power players target male consumers, they use women as cheap sexual marketing tools. The music industry promotes the objectification of women because they are used to sell a product with their sexual appeal. While the majority of the earth’s population is female, most people in positions of influence are actually men. For years, females have been forced to keep silent in a male-dominated world. Jennifer Mclune states in her article “Unlike men, women in hip-hop don’t speak in a collective voice.”(1) Women have very little voice in the music business, and few females wield any real power. The industry is full of male power players including most producers and composers. A heavy hitter in the hip hop world is Rapper Jay Z. He’s been around for several years, and he’s sold plenty of records. Jay Z also has his own clothing line and owns a sports representation agency. Needless to say, this man is at the top of the industry. While he’s extremely popular and influential he has been quite abusive of the female condition. In one of his best selling records he raps “I got 99 problems but a bitch ain't one.” It goes without saying that most women would be offended, yet this is one’s of Jay-Z’s most popular songs. This is merely a small sample to show how women are addressed by men in the music industry. As