10 years ago, a country radio pro dismissed female singers — and 'Tomatogate' was born. Are they getting more respect now?

Yahoo

3 days ago

In 2015, women singers in country music were told they were just the "tomatoes" in a salad of male stars — a juicy soundbite that became known as Tomatogate. One decade later, frustration is still real as country radio stations seem confused about the ingredients that make a perfect salad.
Controversy ensued 10 years ago when a radio consultant suggested female country music artists are not the lettuce in the salad, but rather tomatoes who should be "sprinkled" on a playlist and not in back-to-back rotations.
"If you want to make ratings in country radio, take females out," Keith Hill told the trade publication Country Radio Aircheck in its May 26, 2015, issue.
"Trust me," Hill, whom the publication called "the world's leading authority on music scheduling," continued. "I play great female records, and we've got some right now; they're just not the lettuce in our salad. The lettuce is Luke Bryan and Blake Shelton, Keith Urban and artists like that. The tomatoes of our salad are the females."
"The story made national headlines and riled up both men and women in the music industry. Female artists united. Martina McBride sold "Tomato Lover" T-shirts for her charity, which supports equal rights for women in the music industry. There were think pieces and interviews calling out "Bro Country" and research studies done about gender representation on country radio.
Has anything really changed in the last decade, aside from online outrage?
While covering the Academy of Country Music Awards (ACMs) earlier this month, I talked to some of the biggest female artists in country music to get a state of the union, of sorts. I also spoke with professors doing research on gender representation in country radio. Here's where we stand.
Singer-songwriter Mickey Guyton had an emphatic "Oh yeah" when I asked her if she remembered Tomatogate 10 years ago.
"Not much has changed. It hasn't," Guyton, who was honored at Variety's Power of Women: Nashville earlier this month, told Yahoo Entertainment. She believes there needs to be more female artists played on the radio right now.
"But at a certain point, there's a lot of people that can fight for the system that oppresses us. Until they stop doing that, there's nothing much that we can do to press forward. Like, when do we all decide to say stop accepting the crumbs? Billie Jean King said that," Guyton said, referencing the American tennis great. "We have to stop accepting the crumbs. When's enough enough? I don't know."
Singer Kassi Ashton, who was nominated for New Female Artist of the Year at the ACMs, agreed, saying, "We still have a ways to go" in terms of female representation on the radio. "Last year, there was only one female number one the entire year."
Ella Langley was the only female artist to top the Billboard Country Airplay chart in 2024. There are plenty of charts one can look at, but Billboard's is considered crucial, as it tracks the week's most popular songs ranked by country radio airplay audience impressions. Langley scored her first No. 1 with her hit song "You Look Like You Love Me," which also features male singer Riley Green.
In 2018, Miranda Lambert scored her first No. 1 in four years for her and Jason Aldean's summer hit "Drowns the Whiskey." She infamously called out radio chart disparity and how she "had to sing with someone with a penis to get a number one."
"I do like this person, Jason Aldean, a lot … so it was a great song with an old friend,' she told the Washington Post, adding how "it is interesting that I haven't had even a Top 20 in a long, long time. And then it goes No. 1 because it's a dude."
Kate Duncan, director of the School of Music and Theatre Professions at Loyola University New Orleans, sees that trend reflected in the charts.
"An artist like Miranda Lambert saying she had to have a male feature in order to get recognition is not far off the mark because the bar seems to be so much higher for female accomplishment across the industry," she explained to Yahoo. "We're just seeing that the bar is almost unattainable right now."
Sara Evans, known for hits like "Suds in the Bucket" and "A Little Bit Stronger," told me on the 2025 ACMs red carpet that this is still an issue.
"Radio hasn't played any new music of mine in years — six years probably," she said. Evans won Top Female Vocalist at the awards show in 2006. She was nominated for Female Vocalist of the Year in 2011 and has churned out plenty of music, her latest album getting released in June 2024. "It's crazy. I don't understand it. What would we do without Kacey Musgraves and Dolly Parton if they had never played them?"
It's a point Carrie Underwood, who's one of the biggest faces of country music, made in 2018.
"Even when I was growing up, I wished there was more women on the radio, and I had a lot more than there are today," she said in a podcast interview. "You think about all of the little girls that are sitting at home saying, 'I want to be a country music singer.' What do you tell them? ... How do you look at them and say, 'Well just work hard sweetie and you can do it' when that's not the case right now."
Prior to Langley topping the Billboard Country Airplay chart in December, it had been nearly one year since a woman was featured in the top spot. Lainey Wilson, who was featured on Jelly Roll's "Save Me," hit No. 1 for two weeks in December 2023. Langley ended the second-longest break — 51 weeks — between women topping the chart since a record 61-week shutout in 2003 and 2004, according to Billboard. It's a troubling trend, despite singers like Wilson and newcomer Langley being two of the biggest names in country music right now.
Tomatogate caught the attention of University of Ottawa professor Jada Watson a decade ago, who was awarded two research grants to study different facets of these representational issues. She explained to me how she started out by analyzing representation on Billboard's long-running Hot Country Songs.
"I started to realize that when you have such a deficit of songs by women who are being programmed at radio, they're not getting into the charts," she told Yahoo. "The chart is a formulaic representation of what's going on, because Billboard has a formula for how they calculate it. But it doesn't necessarily tell you what's happening on the day-to-day — radio airplay gives you a better sense."
Watson analyzed radio airplay data, and that's when she said she saw "the source of these issues within radio programming."
"It's been really disheartening. To a certain extent, it almost feels like the more we've spoken about it, the more we've analyzed it, the more we've written about it, the more we've advocated for change, the more radio has clamped down on these practices of not playing songs by women back-to-back of using a quota to relegate a smaller percentage of airplay," Watson said.
Five years after Tomatogate, there was a promising trend — albeit a small one. According to Watson's data analysis of Billboard's gender representation on its Country Airplay chart, from 2018 to 2020, songs by women increased from 13.3% to 18.4%. But in 2021, it dropped, and the trend has been troubling since.
"Songs by women in 2024 received 8.39 percent of the airplay," Watson said. "And 8.23 percent of that was for songs by white women, 0.09 percent was for songs by Black women. What's important to highlight there is that this is the year that Beyoncé releases the Grammy-winning Album of the Year [Cowboy Carter]."
Yes, Beyoncé essentially made up most of that .09%.
"As her song was being released, and as radio was playing it, there was also this backlash about radio not playing it," Watson continued. "It's interesting because they clearly were. And at that time, we were all like, 'Yes! you should be playing it. You can't miss an opportunity to platform Beyoncé with this really fresh, great country song.' But you should also be playing Black women who are in Nashville building their careers right now."
Watson confirmed the trend Lambert pointed out, which is that over the last 10 years, "there is a decline in songs by solo female or all-female groups charting within the top 10. It seems, at times, like the only way a song with a woman can get to [the] top is when it's alongside a man."
While Watson pointed out Wilson and Langley "deserve all of the wins that are coming their way," people shouldn't use that "as a measure of change within the industry."
"We're ignoring the underlying issues. This is not to take away from their talent and their drive and their success because they deserve to win awards — but they get tokenized then. Everyone will say it's getting better for women because this one year, two women really dominated the awards... that's after years of women really not winning awards or even being nominated for awards," Watson continued. "We have to be able to have the conversation that both celebrates their accomplishments, but acknowledge that nothing is changing, that somehow they're winning in spite of what's going on in the industry."
Despite acknowledging that country music still has a gender representation issue in terms of radio play, the stars I talked to wanted to make it clear how supported they feel by other female artists. "I do agree that it's better than it's ever been — and is growing," Reba McEntire told me at the ACMs. "It's a lift up, not a competition anymore."
"Female country music is back, baby. Not that it was ever really gone, but there's so many of us — Ella, Megan [Moroney]— we're all making music that sounds completely different," Ashton said.
Guyton added, "It can't be a competition. It's too hard out there for women for there to be a competition. If anything, we need to lean into each other and really do what we can together to stop accepting the crumbs and getting out there and building a bigger table for us."
Singer Avery Anna told me she feels "blessed to be a woman in country music."
"Sometimes I think it's harder for us girls out here, but now more than ever the women before me have paved the way for artists like me who are up and coming to say what we want to say, be how we want to be and be ourselves — Shania Twain, Taylor Swift, Kacey [Musgraves]," she said. "I just feel blessed they did what they did so I can be more authentic and not be so boxed in."
Gabby Barrett, who came in third on American Idol in 2018, has had a positive experience with radio play.
"I can only speak for myself on that front and I know they've been really kind to me in the past on the radio," she said. "All the radio [representatives] I have met have been very nice and I was just a girl getting into it at the time. I was just a girl coming off a television show, hadn't done the whole 10 years in Nashville kind of story yet and they were still kind enough to play my music. With [Ella Langley] leading in recognition at the ACMs, I definitely think we are in a much better place."
Duncan said that, in terms of the music industry, "the needle has not moved" when it comes to radio play or women "on the production or business side of things."
"The more recent figures on that look like a 3 percent occupation of the music industry is female-led, which is really staggering," she explained. However, Duncan is hopeful.
"What has changed is we're saying that out loud now in ways that had been a bit more hush-hush or a bit more easily brushed off 10 years ago," Duncan continued. "I think there are some really good — we'll say crowbars — cracking some light into the the [underrepresented] industry spaces, but we are we're in the red so significantly with representation that we just need an influx of help to make it more equitable and to make it a safe space for underrepresented people of all those categories."