Smirnoff Music Equalizer Experience

The Tension:

You’d be forgiven for thinking in this day and age that our music was in fact pretty gender-neutral. Well, Smirnoff set out to prove otherwise and the results were a little unnerving. Smirnoff found that as of 2016, just 17% of headliners at electronic music festivals were women for instance; 5% of internationally recognized producers are women and only 3 solo women have won The Mercury Prize award in its entire 22-year history!

The Idea in a Nutshell:

Enter the Equalizer, a playlist generator that links to your Spotify account and analyses your listening history by gender. Whatever the outcome, listeners would be offered a more balanced playlist tailored to their Taste Profile. Smirnoff even added a slider in case users wanted to lean more one way or the other.

The Magic:

Without getting overly nerdy, the Equalizer simply looked into the last six months of streaming data of users who accessed the microsite and revealed what percentage of the artists they were listening to were male or female (including non-binary).