What Hill and his “real-world experience” leave out here is that we don’t really know what the women who listen to country music want to hear, in part because of the call-out research conducted by individual stations to determine what is a hit. The industry is trapped in a cycle where male artists are more successful on radio, allegedly because they are what the audience wants to hear . So record labels spend more money developing, marketing, and touring male artists because it’s what radio audiences want. And radio spends more time testing male artists because labels spend their marketing budgets pushing them. Women end up boxed out of the industry altogether because, other than a few Carrie Underwoods and Maren Morrises, no one wants to fund their rise to superstardom because they’ve already been told the ROI is poor. If you’ve got to spend money to make money, why would you spend money on something you’ve already been told won’t make money?