Let’s play a game. You’re to guess the number of songs by female artists on TurnTable Charts’ Top 100 Songs of 2025 list. Feel free to be as optimistic as possible. Also, feel free to be a gloomy cloud and predict a lower number than the average. If you guessed anything higher than 50, this writer appreciates your belief in equality, but asks that you reckon with reality. If you guessed anything between 20-25, you are closer than the initial set but still far off from the answer. If you guessed somewhere between 10 and 20, you’re a better player than most, and just about off the mark. Not to waste any more time, the answer is 5. Of the 100 top songs of 2025 in Nigeria, between December 2024 and November 2025, compiled by the country’s premier chart aggregator, just 5 were by female artists. 5 songs out of 100. All countable on one hand.
Even worse, the 5 songs represent just two artists: Ayra Starr and Darkoo. Ayra’s hits Gimme Dat (feat. Wizkid),Hot Body, All the Love, and Rush made the cut, alongside Darkoo’s summer soundtrack, Favorite Girl. Gimme Dat was the highest charting of the five at No. 32. A cursory examination of the other end-of-year categories shows the same thing. No female artist in the top 20 Most Streamed Albums list. None in the top 20 Most Streamed Songs list. The top 20 Most Heard Songs on Radio list is the exception here, and even then, we pretty much have a repeat of the Ayra show with 3 songs—to include features would give us 4 at best, with Tiwa Savage’s appearance on Ruger’s Toma Toma.
Tempted as some might be to label these shocking figures an oddity, gendered chart success is a defining feature of the music industry, both home and abroad. Chasmic male-to-female chart success ratios are the norm. And they have been the norm for the better part of the decade. On March 13, 2026, Billboard reported on the 2025 Inclusion in the Recording Studio study, which showed female artists still bottoming on the charts. According to the study, female artists represented 36.1% of spots on the most popular Billboard charts in 2025. As solo artists, women made up 34.5% of the chart, still behind values in 2012, the study’s earliest year. There were fewer women songwriters on the charts (14.5%). And over the past 14 years, just 13.9% of songwriting credits have belonged to female writers. Only 4.4% of producers were women—a figure that’s still higher than the 0% for female lead producers on the TurnTable Charts Top 100 Songs list.
Evidently, there’s a massive valley of commercial success across gendered lines worldwide. This is beyond weekly chart rankings or seasonal highs and lows. The charts simply do not favour female artists. And so while female acts might feature prominently in online jabber across social media, taking up editorial space in prestigious publications and gossip-hunting rags, the charts show a dissonance. There’s an immutable preference for male artists, songwriters, and producers in Nigeria, and the more structural American market. Why this is so is what we must contend with.
On the surface, population is an obvious divider: more men are involved in making music than women. Even before the “Afrobeats to the World” era, casting our lens back on indigenous sounds from earlier eras reveals a larger population of male artists as opposed to female artists. For every Alhaja Queen Salawa Abeni (Waka) in indigenous Yoruba music, there is an Alhaji Sikiru Ayinde Barrister (fuji), General Kollington Ayinla (fuji), Tunde King (juju), Ayinde Bakare (juju), Haruna Ishola (Apala), and Yusuf Olatunji (Sakara), among others. And that’s just looking at originators alone. If this bracket were expanded to include all practitioners, the resulting ratio would be intimidating. Even when Nigerian music began moving towards fusions with Western sounds, and outright incorporation, there were still more male practitioners.
Artists like Onyeka Onwenu, Christy Essien-Igbokwe, Evi Edna Ogholi, and the Lijadu Sisters were bright female stars in a galaxy of XY chromosomes. And often this was to their disadvantage, even when it appeared otherwise. In a 2024 Rolling Stones profile of the Lijadu Sisters, Taiwo Lijadu explained that being lone female acts in a sea of male performers led to untoward results. For instance, in terms of outspoken advocacy music, the military hammer came down heavier on them for this reason. “If you were outspoken as a woman, they’ll beat you up, they’ll hurt you, they’ll do all kinds of things to use you as an example to shut up,” Taiwo mentioned, decrying the Nigerian Government’s dictatorial actions. It would take the early 2010s for Nigeria to witness mainstream female stars that were arguably in the same echelon of commercial success—within and outside the country—as their male peers; namely Tiwa Savage and Yemi Alade, alongside Waje, Niniola, Omawunmi, Simi, Seyi Shay, and others, who built on the legacies of acts like Asa, Sasha P, Weird MC, and Bouqui. And then the 2020s gave us our first female global stars in Tems and Ayra Starr. But even at that, the ratio hasn’t closed. If anything, it’s widened further than Knievel-inspired daredevil record labels would dare cross.
In a conversation with Culture Custodian, Obinna Agwu, a music executive with over 15 years of experience across institutions like Chocolate City, Boomplay, and Trybe Records, addresses this base-population disadvantage as a major factor. “In Nigeria, there are simply more men trying to become artists and build careers from music than women, so naturally the charts will reflect that to a high degree,” he explains. But even beyond the numbers, another factor is the manner in which the industry is structured. Agwu emphasises the conditions which female artists without managerial or label support have to navigate, saying “This business is a lot of movement: studio sessions, media runs, late-night networking, travel, shows, club appearances, constant visibility, and generally just being in the mix. For a man, that movement is already hard enough. For a woman doing it alone, it can be even more demanding, more uncomfortable, and, in some cases, less safe. A lot of female artists are navigating an environment that can be exhausting, isolating, and difficult to move through without some help.” If female artists can’t even make it to studio sessions to create magic because of concerns for safety, they are already beginning the race several meters behind, talent notwithstanding. In a 24 June 2025 X post on the subject, singer Estherr, who’s worked on multiple songs with Seyi Vibez, spoke about the cost of such late-night sessions on romantic relationships—a factor that ties into the warped perception of female entertainers as promiscuous, as opposed to the actual culprits.
Genres also play a huge role in chart success. Beyond the gendered constraints, there’s a measure of charting that Afropop and Streethop achieve on a consistent basis, one not found in other genres. Of the top 50 songs in TurnTable Charts’ Official Nigeria Top 100—dated June 12 to June 18—only 5 would not qualify as Afropop or a fusion thereof (Dai Dai, Aanu Ni, hate that I made you love me, Tornado, and Raindance), and even 2 of those 5 are questionable. Given that a considerable number of female artists are drawn towards R&B, soul, and alternative genres, their chances of achieving chart success are inevitably dented. It’s why an album like Tems’ Born in The Wild did not perform well on Nigerian charts but had a good foreign outing. And why she’s charted What You Need on the Billboard Hot 100 for as long as 14 weeks, without similar results on this end. It’s also why Ayra’s biggest hits on Nigerian charts haven’t been her stronger R&B cuts but the AfroR&B and mid-tempo Afropop records—think Rush and more recently, how All The Love paled in comparison to Hot Body and Gimme Dat.
The Amapiano rut of the past 5 years has been sustained by this appeal to popularity with artists shirking genres they are more proficient in to pursue commercial success. But with the alternative scene finding structure, there would be a monogenre on our radios, and listening through the charts would be even more of a bore than it already is. The upside is that certain female artists are able to break through, such as Smur Lee whose Street-hop Amapiano tunes come off as more authentic than those of several of her male peers; panache and rapping ability in one effervescent package.
So, while there isn’t a guarantee that being a male artist equals making it to the A-list, the odds are still somewhat skewed. Most male artists will be left on the cutting floor, but most female artists won’t even make it there to begin with. Concerning this disadvantage, Agwu tells us, “Male artists are still more likely to get signed, funded, marketed, and given repeated chances to figure it out. Female artists often don’t get the same patience. One record underperforming can suddenly affect how seriously they are taken.” The result is a disparate set of performance metrics compared with male colleagues in terms of image, sex appeal, attitude, dressing, relationships, and public perception.
For influencer and music marketer Sanusi Misturah Morenikeji, professionally known as ‘Big Bad Reni,’ narrowing this difference down to the oversimplified ‘sexism’ and ‘misogyny’ doesn’t sufficiently capture the scale of its effects. “If I want to break it down specifically, it [misogyny] shows in who gets signed, desirability politics—which is not to say that desirability politics doesn’t affect male artists, but the standards for male artists are not as stringent as those for female artists. You can be a very fantastic female artist, and if you are not digestible, it’s going to be difficult for you to break into the mainstream. Even if you are in the alternative scene, you are going to get the worst end of the stick. People are going to insult you and call you all kinds of names for having alt looks,” she explains.
In her experience, this extends to marketing strategy. Reni has noticed a disturbing pattern for female artists’ briefs where they are boxed into ‘Girl power’ promotion or forced beef, the latter eventually translating into rhetoric of women not supporting women. Additionally, there’s the oversexualisation of female acts that she believes crosses over from highlighting female sexuality or sensuality to outright objectification, especially when it has nothing to do with the music. In a specific instance, Reni notes that a female artist was promoted by a particular X page, and rather than focusing heavily on her name and brand like others on the same roster, there was a deliberate positioning to ensure people talked about her body.
Sexualisation isn’t nearly always about style, as it is about the predatory nature of the industry. In the Lijadu Sisters’ RollingStone profile, Taiwo Lijadu, expounding on the twins’ critical commentary of labels in the 1988 documentary, Kokonbe: The Nigerian Pop Music Scene, lamented,“We didn’t have businesspeople backing us. All they wanted was sex. It’s another thing if you have to do a job somewhere, a radio station, a television station, anywhere, you were invited to go there, and then they start harassing you for sex. And that was why we pulled back, that was what we didn’t want to deal with.” The current iteration of the Nigerian music industry appears to have substantially minimised, although there are still instances where objectification comes into play.
Perhaps having more female executives pulling the strings might help even out these figures. Reni believes that this is only a solution if these women are correspondingly feminist in their thinking. “We have no shortage of women who are excellent at their jobs across the board: artists, videographers, execs, media, etc. However, we need feminist women to platform and champion other women. That way, when certain conversations are brought up in the industry, it needs to be shut down immediately,” she asserts. Programs like Tems’ Leading Vibe Initiative are essential to this cause. The initial cohort took place between 8 and 9 August 2025, and featured curated workshops, networking moments, and panel discussions for female artists, producers, songwriters, engineers, and music professionals. In conversation with TVC, Tems expressed the importance of the initiative in an industry that’s tougher for women to navigate, further citing the need to stay original and stick with one’s vision. Before then, in 2022, the non-profit organisation Women in Music established a Nigerian chapter to advance, empower, educate, and create opportunities for women in the music industry, at a time when Afropop’s global boom was in full swing.
There is no shortage of outstanding female music executives broadening the horizon, both old and young. Using TurnTable Charts’ 2025 Power List as a reference point, you find a reputable coterie of female music executives functioning as CEOs, COOs, Founders, Continental Directors and Operations Heads, Regional Directors, Country Heads, Managers, and A&Rs for some of the biggest music-related organisations on the continent. These women are breaking the ceiling in many instances, and have given, or begun to give back, to younger professionals.
Chart success in Nigeria and commercial success as a whole are gendered, in tandem with the figures obtainable outside the continent. But this is far from a deliberate divide by industry forces. Neither does it guarantee success to any male artist looking to make their breakthrough on the charts. We can acknowledge this while also interrogating the causes and possible solutions within the broader sustainability framework. Because at the end of the day, careers are more than charts. Some artists need not appear on any chart from today till they cross to the great beyond to keep earning royalties from their catalogue. And just as well, some artists will always be on tour, limited only by health and unforeseen circumstances, rather than by the lack of a stage and a paycheck. When the industry finds that balance for female artists, then we can claim to have begun cookin’.
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