Numbers

1 = The number of female solos (Carrie Underwood/Last Name) in this week's Billboard/R&R Country Top 10 singles

2 = The number of female solos (Miranda Lambert/Gunpowder & Lead) in the Top 15.

If you add Lady Antebellum/Love Don't Live Here and Josh Turner w/Trisha Yearwood/Another Try, that makes four of the top 15 (27%) songs this week which have female voices on them.

6 = 30% of the top 20 are by female voices, when you add Sugarland/All I Want To Do and Reba McEntire w/Kenny Chesney/Every Other Weekend.

7 = The number of female voices in the top 25 (28%), as Taylor Swift/Should've Said No moves up this week.

8 = The number of songs by female voices in the 15 chart number slots between #26 and #40 (53%).

4 out of 5 = 80% of the songs which rank between #36 and #40 are by female voices.

i.e.: If you tune into the first hour of any of the weekly countdown shows, you're going to hear a lot of female voices in a row. The closer you get to #1 on the spin charts, the more male voices, it seems.

Judging from these stats, of the 11 songs ranking between #16 and 40 which include female artists, most likely only four of them will make it to the Top 15 in the coming weeks.

If you have any theories, please post them below.

Mine: you can get into medium or light rotation with a song and a personna which we programmers like, but you can't get into the Top 15 without also demonstrating strong and balanced listener appeal in research as well. And, with our listeners - even when you make the sample 60/40 female/male - the majority of women seem to have a harder time than men do.

But, not always: the very best year for females of the last decade was 2005, when 26% of the highest-testing songs of the year were by women artists in A&O's annual year-end music research rewind. Since then, the percentage by women in the best of the best has fallen to 21% (2006) and 20% (2007).