It seems like it’s a great time to be a female music artist. Taylor Swift and Beyoncé defined this summer with their groundbreaking stadium tours, Olivia Rodrigo and Doja Cat have both just released albums that look like they’ll be wildly successful, and to top it off, many of the recent top ten songs on the Billboard 100 charts have either been performed by or featured women. What about this moment is contributing to these artists’ highly-visible successes, and how can we continue to support them?

For starters, their audiences are more wide-ranging than people might expect. Swift, for example, is often stereotyped as an artist solely for teen girls. However, Morning Consult reports that her “avid” fans are only 52% women, leaving 48% of her fans — a large minority — as male. (The survey had no data for nonbinary respondents.) Additionally, although a majority of her fans are Gen Zers or millennials, a significant portion of them are Gen Xers (21%) or even baby boomers (23%). Her appeal, and that of many of her peers, isn’t limited to a single demographic. Their diverse listener bases are admirable and allow for their success to be taken more seriously.

Also, labels are starting to listen to fans. Specifically in the country music industry, there’s a popular misconception that listeners don’t want to listen to women very much, or even that they don’t want two female musicians on the radio back-to-back. However, that’s actually not true at all. A study by Country Music Television and Coleman Insights revealed that 84% of country music listeners want equal play on the radio, and 28% would actually listen more if there were more women. The study was the beginning of the Equal Play Campaign that CMT started, which aims to increase the representation of female artists in country music. This initiative is a promising sign that labels are recognizing that listeners care about gender parity, and are taking measurable steps to achieve it.

Although certain female music artists seem to be doing extraordinarily well, there’s still a long way to go in terms of equality in the music industry. In 2022, the USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative reported that 14% of songwriters (and just 3.4% of producers) credited that year were women. It’s a good sign, though, that the same study reported that 30% of the Billboard Top 100 Year-End Chart artists were women — a major improvement from years past. The study showed that things are getting better for women in music, but we’re still a while away from true parity.

The message, then, is clear: keep listening to female artists. Don’t forget to support the women behind the scenes as well, like the producers, engineers, and songwriters that make the chart-toppers possible.