Well, that's society in general.
Yes, I know. Doesn't stop me getting hacked off about it, though.
Rock critics usually put down whatever is popular on Top 40 radio.
Well, mostly but not always. Depends on the artist / band.
It's been said that whatever is mainstream popular on Top 40 & Adult Contemporary radio is mostly because of the female audience. If you look at old footage of old hard rock, progressive rock, & heavy metal concerts, the audience is primarily white males.
I know. I was at those concerts, lol.
That stuff got little if any Top 40 airplay.
Depends on the radio station or the DJ. Album tracks did get played, even on Radio 1. Bob Harris, John Peel to name just two. They played album tracks or singles that weren't expected to go high in the charts. Daytime playlists did centre around the Top 40, sure, but there were various places where you could pick up other stuff. Pirate radio wasn't so ruled by playlists, thank god. Later on, there were more radio stations so it got better quite naturally. It was never perfect but nothing is.
But if you look at what the critics called "hair metal" to put it down, there's more females in the audience. Those acts like Bon Jovi, Quiet Riot, & Def Leppard sold a lot more than the regular heavy metal bands like Iron Maiden. The glam metal bands had "power ballads" that appealed to female teenagers & young adult women and the glam metal bands were played on Top 40.
Bon Jovi, for sure, it was mostly women down at the front of their gigs but, overall, I'd say their audience was pretty evenly split female - male.
Also the regular metal bands & prog rock bands often had Dungeons & Dragons type lyrics that had little appeal to mainstream radio listeners.
Is that relevant, though? Lyrics don't figure largely for lots of people, anyway, so the content doesn't always matter that much. Black Sabbath's Paranoid isn't exactly a cheerful ditty but it got to No.4 in the UK.
[ ... ] Many people don't pay attention to the lyrics of songs anyway.
I agree which is why I don't think Dungeons and Dragons type lyrics matter all that much to a radio audience.
It was females who intially made Elvis Presley, Frank Sinatra, & The Beatles really popular. It was a white male DJ at a rock music radio station who started the "disco sucks" thing in the 1970s. Disco appealed to men & women of many ethnicities, straight people & homosexuals, not just mainly straight white guys like rock did.
oh sure, but there was sexism in the disco scene also. It's everywhere. Doesn't matter how inclusive a genre is compared to the next one, there are always problems. Which doesn't surprise me but it's annoying. Disco wasn't perfect, in this regard, any more than punk was even though both genres were challenging the tired old norms (allegedly).