A friend of mine decided to pursue music production around the same time I started in software engineering. We're both 20 somethings. We swap war stories now and then.
I get to hear about how he's working with his mentor to do vocal production on a track getting pitched for Maroon 5, The Chainsmokers, etc. Sometimes the tracks take -- the artist likes them and decides to move forward. Usually they don't and it's a lot of getting your hopes up for nothing. These major artists have lots of songs getting thrown at them on any given day. To date some of my friends biggest credits are vocal production credits on a couple billboard top 100s. A single track will have 50 names on it between writing, production, studio performance, etc.
My friend's mentor is late 30s and mainly does songwriting. He's been trying to do a solo thing but just isn't marketable. However, just recently he "made" it with a feature on a top 100 song and a couple songs picked up by major artists. The checks cleared this last year but the songs came out a couple years ago. He went from "how do I pay rent" to 7M literally over night. He moved to WA to dodge CA income tax. My friend has been able to tie a couple big checks together over the years, but it's been tough. One year it's 100k, the next it's 20k and all from ads and random tv shows.
I'm consistently shocked when talking with my friend just how little music matters in the music industry. The people who make the most look good, sound good, and hell they're crazy talented. But they aren't the people who've written the lyrics or the melodies that define our culture. We probably can't name those people.
I have a few friends in the business and they are basically all broke except for one. Music is like the game industry. Hits based and there are far more talented people pursuing it than there are hits. Being talented isn’t enough, you need to be well connected, good looking, lucky, etc. The internet has made it better than ever to carve out a niche and get a few thousand fans, but it’s still hard to get people to choose you over the millions of other things screaming for attention.
If he waited for the big check before he made that move, CA will find him - it's not where you live when you got the check, it's where you live when you earned it.
> My friend's mentor is late 30s and mainly does songwriting. ... He went from "how do I pay rent" to 7M literally over night.
> The people who make the most look good, sound good, and hell they're crazy talented. But they aren't the people who've written the lyrics or the melodies that define our culture.
I am confused by the story: isn't the person who made the big bucks here a person who "mainly does songwriting"?
Anecdote: My dad was in the music industry in the 80s, and he knew song writers. He joked about how funny it was to hear, for example, a (male) friend singing a demo of “Like A Virgin.”
Find some episodes of The Muppet Show. Late 1970s, with a entertainment-related guest on each episode.
Sometimes the guest is an actor or actress, and they're very nice looking.
Sometimes the guest is a musician... and they look funny to modern eyes. Then they pull out their instrument or open their mouth, and you can hear the same (or better) quality as today's musicians.
The Muppet Show ended in 1981. MTV launched in 1981.
I took a job recently client basically twisted my arm I didn't need to work. One of the guys on the job is a live country musician, a big one. They're not on tour right now and he doesn't just sit around he works so he's out laying tile doing whatever carpentry work he can during the covid lockdown with no live shows. He hates country absolutely can't stand it, but fell into the country crowd early in his career and now that's all he plays. So this guy's up there playing big huge amazing country shows hates every minute of it.
> I get to hear about how he's working with his mentor to do vocal production on a track getting pitched for Maroon 5, The Chainsmokers, etc. Sometimes the tracks take -- the artist likes them and decides to move forward. Usually they don't and it's a lot of getting your hopes up for nothing
This lines up with stories I’ve heard from a friend who had some success in the music industry (2 gold records), was signed to a major label, then dropped so went into song writing.
> A single track will have 50 names on it between writing, production, studio performance, etc.
This is something I've noticed more and more lately. The list of credits on everything is huge. I happened to see an episode of Family Guy the other day. I haven't regularly watched it for years, but noticed on this one there were literally minutes of credits at the beginning. It went on and on and on. I don't know why this is or what it means, but it's interesting.
> I'm consistently shocked when talking with my friend just how little music matters in the music industry. The people who make the most look good, sound good, and hell they're crazy talented. But they aren't the people who've written the lyrics or the melodies that define our culture. We probably can't name those people.
I don't think this is a new phenomenon by any means. I was reading the other day about The Beatles and how, when they became big in the USA, the professional songwriters of the time were worried because these guys wrote their own songs. Apparently it was almost unheard of at the time.
Excepting songwriters who are/were also recording artists (The Beatles, Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Prince, Danny
Elfman, Elton John, Randy Newman, Sia....)
How about Max Martin? Stock Aitken Waterman? Lieber and Stoller?
There are of course many well-known song composers and lyricists in contemporary musical film and theater, for example Alan Menken, Andrew Lloyd Weber, Stephen Sondheim...
I thought songwriters had some sort of union or industry group that went to bat for them? The article and this discussion makes it sound that doesn't exist.
edit: hmm, ASCAP and Songwriters guild are a couple names that come up... though this might be something of a dispute within different groups within ASCAP..
In what way are they "crazy talented" if they dont author the lyrics or the music? Is it meant cynically to describe the situation where the performer is just packaging for someone else's talant?
It seems as though this is not a well understood issue from reading the comments here. This isn’t artists doing interviews and saying “I wrote this”. The problem is that the artists are bullying their way into getting points for the song writing credits (publishing royalties) when they had little(change a word in the lyrics) or no input into the song.
I fully support artists getting as much of the live performance/merch/appearances money as they can. If they did not write a song they should not be getting paid for songwriting. All of the justifications in the article dating back to Elvis Presley show how long the business has been slimy.
Indeed, and it goes back before Elvis. Screwing popular songwriters of their royalties has been a fixture of the music business since time immoral. From what I've read, Jelly Roll Morton's publisher added his own lyrics to Morton's instrumental tunes, to get a cut of the royalties. And it goes back before the recording industry. Before the phonograph, the "music business" was sheet music, there were "stars," and sheet music composers experienced all of the shenanigans that we associate with the music business today.
I always thought the artists make token edits to the songs so they can keep up the charade of writing their own songs for marketing reasons.
Someone told me "Taylor Swift writes her own songs." Sure, but when you look at the songwriters on 1989, over half of them were at least co-written by the song writer with the most #1 hits after McCartney and Lennon.
If Rihanna sings your song it might have a much greater chance of being a hit.10% of a million dollars is better than 100% of 10000 dollars. You just have to do the math and figure if its worth it or not.
>> If they did not write a song they should not be getting paid for songwriting.
What does "write the song" mean though? You hear lots of remix and cover versions of famous songs which are obviously derivative works, but what if that happens before the song is ever published? What if a song writer creates a song specifically for an artist? Do these stylistic influences count for writing credit? The line is not well defined.
However I think being able to say "I (co-)wrote this" also plays a part - especially in Elvis' time, actual singer-songwriters were probably held in greater esteem than artists that were just "parroting" songs others wrote for them, so giving the impression that they were involved in writing the songs may have been important from that perspective too...
It's not like 10% of sales goes to the song writer, so the artist changing a word means that the artist gets and additional 1% and the song writer only 9%. Surely at the point of producing a contract everyone negotiates the split and signs the contract if they are happy with the deal.
This unfortunately has been a long used tactic in the music world. In the old times it was sharpie producers putting their names as writers for songs of poor black artists, so they (the producers) can get royalties in addition to their usual fees. Now it is the singers taking advantage of the songwriters and composers.
It is all evil but it kind of shows who has the negotiation leverage. Todays pop music scene is all about creating a celebrity image consumers want to identify with. Once said image is created the actual music is not that important. So the writers do not get much credit.
As a huge fan of blackpink I highly recommend you check out the documentary they have on Netflix. It became obvious after watching it that the genius behind blackpink is Teddy Park, who was also behind another massively successful girl group 2NE1.
I've thought about it slightly and without Teddy Park there is no blackpink, but without the individual members each bringing their own flavour to the group, there is no blackpink either.
If you're familiar with the concept art industry, this is essentially just character design but with living people.
We are being fed a story, Katy Perry and Ariana Grande are good examples of this.
A lot of people seem to be taking a legalistic or moralistic view on this. Along the lines of "copyright works like this" or "people should get credit for what they do".
The economic view would be something like:
- There's a pie to be split, often beforehand. Some players are in better negotiating positions than others. Sadly, if you don't know a lot of performers, you'll have a hard time getting a bigger slice from the one that shows up.
- It's not actually relevant who is on the document as a "writer". This is simply a thing to be negotiated over so that the performer is incentivized to do the recording. It's the same thing as putting up sales tax on a purchaser of goods, legally the buyer is paying x% extra, but economically the buyer and the seller actually split the bill according to negotiating power.
- What will happen if it's enshrined that only the person who actually wrote the piece gets his name on it? Well there will be other things to bargain over. For instance, maybe you get your name exclusively on the song, but you put it in a company and the performer gets a piece of the company.
The writers are trying to affect their negotiating power by introducing a new element into the contract process: social pressure.
Heretofore there's been a gentleman's agreement about writing credits which benefited the artist, and that's largely been enforced by the reality that artists (and publishers) need writers less than writers need them.
But, what does a pop artist in the 21st century need more than anything in order to succeed? Their image on social media. The underlying threat here is the class issues, and the tactical deployment of the gig economy (song writers driving Ubers) was not accidental.
When the word "exploitation" starts getting thrown around, and comparisons to how black artists were treated in the early years of the music industry start getting made, the pressure on artists and their representation will grow, and the dynamics of the contract process will change. That's what the writers are hoping will happen, anyway.
This seems like a reductive view which is based on ignorance of how songwriting royalties work.
Songwriting credit is copyright in the music and lyrics of the song. Artist credit is copyright in a specific recording of a song.
So if you write a song which is a great song, and Arianna Grande records a lackluster version which nobody likes that much, but then several other artists pick up on the fact that it's a great song and record their own highly successful versions, then the songwriter would do very well from this, but Arianna Grande wouldn't share in the later success of the cover versions.
If Arianna gets a 30% writers credit just for putting her own 'vibe' on the original recording, then she participates in the upside of the cover versions, even though they might have been successful despite her rather than because of her.
It feels like in order to have this conversation intelligently, we all need to me on the same page about how royalties work, and the difference in royalty types (at least mechanical vs performance royalties).
From the comments I've read so far, I'd say next to nobody here knows the split difference between record contracts and publishing contracts.
Here's how it was when I studied this 15 years ago.
In a traditional big four record contract, the artist (which for a band like Korn is five people), the record label gets 92% and the artist gets 8% (to split between them), but that's only on domestic (US) sales. On international sales the split is worse at 96%/4%. The artist would typically also pay for any damaged product, which mattered more in the case of shellac records as they are more brittle and broke more often.
For a publishing contract there's more variance in the split but it would typically be more like 60/40.
The music business has been massively "democratized" last few decades.
Now anyone can record high quality music at home. Anyone can self publish their music for the world to enjoy. Both were unthinkable a few decades ago.
But there are still a few gatekeepers, and gatekeepers will usually charge for opening their gate. Why wouldn't they?
A megastar can choose to record any of dozens of equally good songs. Whoever they choose will sell 100x more. So in one sense it's fair they get a share of the money they create by adding their fame and talent to the song.
They added that composers were often subjected to "bully tactics and threats" by artists and executives who wanted to take a share of the songwriting royalties.
Ultimately, I wonder where the money ends up between the artist and the executive.
This article (not the pact's message) seems to be unfairly framing this as writers vs artists, but the real bad guy could be some suit at UMI or EMG...
It sucks for the writers all the same, but don't misplace your anger.
As someone who grew up with the advent of the world wide web and got my start coding on Geocities, I very much appreciate the choice to add a scrolling marquee and visit counter towards the bottom of the site.
Songwriters getting the short stick is an old fact in the 'industry'. (There's a Songwriter's Hall of Fame - ever seen it's inductees on TV?)
Back in the rock'n'roll era, with the new 'teenager' category raining allowances on labels, label-owners often got a co-writer credit on songs. (And then there was the vinyl shipped 'off the books'.) They also typically grabbed up publishing rights.
Since streaming began: I've seen figures like $2 per 1000 streams for big-name artists. I've never seen figures mentioned for songwriters. At one time a top-10 hit might be covered by dozens of big names (each a potential revenue source for decades) - today stuff comes & goes quickly.
Interesting to read this as from my British point of view, I thought the opposite was true: songwriters took the lion's share while musicians got relatively little.
Thinking about The Beatles, for example, Paul McCartney is way richer than Ringo Starr. The common wisdom is it's because he wrote the songs and Ringo was just the drummer.
Also there's the example of the song "Bitter Sweet Symphony" where members of the Rolling Stones claimed songwriting credits and took all the song's royalties [0].
Songwriting is akin to salary: writer gets paid every time, non depending if the song was a complete failure, while all the risk, organization and marketing is on the pop star.
The thing in short supply is not catchy tunes and beautiful lyrics. The thing in short supply is the attention of an audience in a world full of distractions. A popstar brings you attention. You bring them the hit song. You will get a smaller share of a huge pie in return.
If you wish, you can take a 100% share of a tiny pie and keep your artistic author's integrity.
I wonder if Max Martin or Dr. Luke have these issues? Is it a matter of the larger the stable of artists and hits you have in your portfolio then the more negotiating power you have? I'm just curious, I honestly don't know.
Wow I had no idea this was taking place. It reminds me a little of the fight hollywood screenwriters have fought to get equal billing and recognition. I always assumed that the writer got the most money!
Entering the modern commercial music industry to then complain about having to share credits is like getting a software developer job and be upset that you are expected to write code.
At the end of the day, the singer brings in 100x more value to the table because what ever genetic lottery they won combined with whatever they did to capitalize on that means millions of people with poor taste want to throw money at them for the illusion of them being a musician. The song writers are much more replacable then the "face" in this scheme regardless of where the talent lies.
Anyway point being, don't get into commercial music if you don't like it. There are plenty of ways to maintain artistic integrity as a trade off for money but these writers choose to sell out instead. So don't sell out and then whine about not being able to keep your integrity.
Well, a lot of heartache and nonsense could be avoided ny paying songwriters fairly but could a song written for Arethra Franklin havethe same effect when sung by say Solange Knowles?
[+] [-] rgifford|5 years ago|reply
I get to hear about how he's working with his mentor to do vocal production on a track getting pitched for Maroon 5, The Chainsmokers, etc. Sometimes the tracks take -- the artist likes them and decides to move forward. Usually they don't and it's a lot of getting your hopes up for nothing. These major artists have lots of songs getting thrown at them on any given day. To date some of my friends biggest credits are vocal production credits on a couple billboard top 100s. A single track will have 50 names on it between writing, production, studio performance, etc.
My friend's mentor is late 30s and mainly does songwriting. He's been trying to do a solo thing but just isn't marketable. However, just recently he "made" it with a feature on a top 100 song and a couple songs picked up by major artists. The checks cleared this last year but the songs came out a couple years ago. He went from "how do I pay rent" to 7M literally over night. He moved to WA to dodge CA income tax. My friend has been able to tie a couple big checks together over the years, but it's been tough. One year it's 100k, the next it's 20k and all from ads and random tv shows.
I'm consistently shocked when talking with my friend just how little music matters in the music industry. The people who make the most look good, sound good, and hell they're crazy talented. But they aren't the people who've written the lyrics or the melodies that define our culture. We probably can't name those people.
[+] [-] throwaway1777|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Johnny555|5 years ago|reply
If he waited for the big check before he made that move, CA will find him - it's not where you live when you got the check, it's where you live when you earned it.
[+] [-] saurik|5 years ago|reply
> The people who make the most look good, sound good, and hell they're crazy talented. But they aren't the people who've written the lyrics or the melodies that define our culture.
I am confused by the story: isn't the person who made the big bucks here a person who "mainly does songwriting"?
[+] [-] ryantgtg|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dsr_|5 years ago|reply
Sometimes the guest is an actor or actress, and they're very nice looking.
Sometimes the guest is a musician... and they look funny to modern eyes. Then they pull out their instrument or open their mouth, and you can hear the same (or better) quality as today's musicians.
The Muppet Show ended in 1981. MTV launched in 1981.
[+] [-] lumberingjack|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] whycombagator|5 years ago|reply
This lines up with stories I’ve heard from a friend who had some success in the music industry (2 gold records), was signed to a major label, then dropped so went into song writing.
It’s a hyper competitive industry to operate in
[+] [-] globular-toast|5 years ago|reply
This is something I've noticed more and more lately. The list of credits on everything is huge. I happened to see an episode of Family Guy the other day. I haven't regularly watched it for years, but noticed on this one there were literally minutes of credits at the beginning. It went on and on and on. I don't know why this is or what it means, but it's interesting.
> I'm consistently shocked when talking with my friend just how little music matters in the music industry. The people who make the most look good, sound good, and hell they're crazy talented. But they aren't the people who've written the lyrics or the melodies that define our culture. We probably can't name those people.
I don't think this is a new phenomenon by any means. I was reading the other day about The Beatles and how, when they became big in the USA, the professional songwriters of the time were worried because these guys wrote their own songs. Apparently it was almost unheard of at the time.
[+] [-] musicale|5 years ago|reply
Excepting songwriters who are/were also recording artists (The Beatles, Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Prince, Danny Elfman, Elton John, Randy Newman, Sia....)
How about Max Martin? Stock Aitken Waterman? Lieber and Stoller?
There are of course many well-known song composers and lyricists in contemporary musical film and theater, for example Alan Menken, Andrew Lloyd Weber, Stephen Sondheim...
[+] [-] dv_dt|5 years ago|reply
edit: hmm, ASCAP and Songwriters guild are a couple names that come up... though this might be something of a dispute within different groups within ASCAP..
[+] [-] WalterBright|5 years ago|reply
WA is closing that loophole. They just passed a gigantic capital gains tax.
[+] [-] sorokod|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BitwiseFool|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] asah|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] S_A_P|5 years ago|reply
I fully support artists getting as much of the live performance/merch/appearances money as they can. If they did not write a song they should not be getting paid for songwriting. All of the justifications in the article dating back to Elvis Presley show how long the business has been slimy.
[+] [-] analog31|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dehrmann|5 years ago|reply
Someone told me "Taylor Swift writes her own songs." Sure, but when you look at the songwriters on 1989, over half of them were at least co-written by the song writer with the most #1 hits after McCartney and Lennon.
[+] [-] aantix|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] samfisher83|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] skeeter2020|5 years ago|reply
What does "write the song" mean though? You hear lots of remix and cover versions of famous songs which are obviously derivative works, but what if that happens before the song is ever published? What if a song writer creates a song specifically for an artist? Do these stylistic influences count for writing credit? The line is not well defined.
[+] [-] rob74|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iams|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hristov|5 years ago|reply
It is all evil but it kind of shows who has the negotiation leverage. Todays pop music scene is all about creating a celebrity image consumers want to identify with. Once said image is created the actual music is not that important. So the writers do not get much credit.
[+] [-] HiroshiSan|5 years ago|reply
I've thought about it slightly and without Teddy Park there is no blackpink, but without the individual members each bringing their own flavour to the group, there is no blackpink either.
If you're familiar with the concept art industry, this is essentially just character design but with living people.
We are being fed a story, Katy Perry and Ariana Grande are good examples of this.
[+] [-] bmohlenhoff|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iams|5 years ago|reply
Why do you need to be a writer to get royalties. Would the producers not be able to ask for a royalty regardless?
[+] [-] lordnacho|5 years ago|reply
The economic view would be something like:
- There's a pie to be split, often beforehand. Some players are in better negotiating positions than others. Sadly, if you don't know a lot of performers, you'll have a hard time getting a bigger slice from the one that shows up.
- It's not actually relevant who is on the document as a "writer". This is simply a thing to be negotiated over so that the performer is incentivized to do the recording. It's the same thing as putting up sales tax on a purchaser of goods, legally the buyer is paying x% extra, but economically the buyer and the seller actually split the bill according to negotiating power.
- What will happen if it's enshrined that only the person who actually wrote the piece gets his name on it? Well there will be other things to bargain over. For instance, maybe you get your name exclusively on the song, but you put it in a company and the performer gets a piece of the company.
[+] [-] karaterobot|5 years ago|reply
Heretofore there's been a gentleman's agreement about writing credits which benefited the artist, and that's largely been enforced by the reality that artists (and publishers) need writers less than writers need them.
But, what does a pop artist in the 21st century need more than anything in order to succeed? Their image on social media. The underlying threat here is the class issues, and the tactical deployment of the gig economy (song writers driving Ubers) was not accidental.
When the word "exploitation" starts getting thrown around, and comparisons to how black artists were treated in the early years of the music industry start getting made, the pressure on artists and their representation will grow, and the dynamics of the contract process will change. That's what the writers are hoping will happen, anyway.
[+] [-] exactlysolved|5 years ago|reply
Songwriting credit is copyright in the music and lyrics of the song. Artist credit is copyright in a specific recording of a song.
So if you write a song which is a great song, and Arianna Grande records a lackluster version which nobody likes that much, but then several other artists pick up on the fact that it's a great song and record their own highly successful versions, then the songwriter would do very well from this, but Arianna Grande wouldn't share in the later success of the cover versions.
If Arianna gets a 30% writers credit just for putting her own 'vibe' on the original recording, then she participates in the upside of the cover versions, even though they might have been successful despite her rather than because of her.
[+] [-] apercu|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yakshaving_jgt|5 years ago|reply
Here's how it was when I studied this 15 years ago.
In a traditional big four record contract, the artist (which for a band like Korn is five people), the record label gets 92% and the artist gets 8% (to split between them), but that's only on domestic (US) sales. On international sales the split is worse at 96%/4%. The artist would typically also pay for any damaged product, which mattered more in the case of shellac records as they are more brittle and broke more often.
For a publishing contract there's more variance in the split but it would typically be more like 60/40.
[+] [-] tnolet|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] runevault|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BurningFrog|5 years ago|reply
Now anyone can record high quality music at home. Anyone can self publish their music for the world to enjoy. Both were unthinkable a few decades ago.
But there are still a few gatekeepers, and gatekeepers will usually charge for opening their gate. Why wouldn't they?
A megastar can choose to record any of dozens of equally good songs. Whoever they choose will sell 100x more. So in one sense it's fair they get a share of the money they create by adding their fame and talent to the song.
[+] [-] dfxm12|5 years ago|reply
Ultimately, I wonder where the money ends up between the artist and the executive.
This article (not the pact's message) seems to be unfairly framing this as writers vs artists, but the real bad guy could be some suit at UMI or EMG...
It sucks for the writers all the same, but don't misplace your anger.
[+] [-] andygcook|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 8bitsrule|5 years ago|reply
Back in the rock'n'roll era, with the new 'teenager' category raining allowances on labels, label-owners often got a co-writer credit on songs. (And then there was the vinyl shipped 'off the books'.) They also typically grabbed up publishing rights.
Since streaming began: I've seen figures like $2 per 1000 streams for big-name artists. I've never seen figures mentioned for songwriters. At one time a top-10 hit might be covered by dozens of big names (each a potential revenue source for decades) - today stuff comes & goes quickly.
[+] [-] globular-toast|5 years ago|reply
Thinking about The Beatles, for example, Paul McCartney is way richer than Ringo Starr. The common wisdom is it's because he wrote the songs and Ringo was just the drummer.
Also there's the example of the song "Bitter Sweet Symphony" where members of the Rolling Stones claimed songwriting credits and took all the song's royalties [0].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitter_Sweet_Symphony
[+] [-] juskrey|5 years ago|reply
So I guess the answer is no.
[+] [-] TheOtherHobbes|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TheMagicHorsey|5 years ago|reply
The thing in short supply is not catchy tunes and beautiful lyrics. The thing in short supply is the attention of an audience in a world full of distractions. A popstar brings you attention. You bring them the hit song. You will get a smaller share of a huge pie in return.
If you wish, you can take a 100% share of a tiny pie and keep your artistic author's integrity.
That's the tradeoff.
[+] [-] taylodl|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Simulacra|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rsync|5 years ago|reply
"Hit songwriters ask pop stars to stop taking credit for songs they didn't write"
... makes me think of this Don Draper quote:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=77Y6CIyyBcI
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] anm89|5 years ago|reply
At the end of the day, the singer brings in 100x more value to the table because what ever genetic lottery they won combined with whatever they did to capitalize on that means millions of people with poor taste want to throw money at them for the illusion of them being a musician. The song writers are much more replacable then the "face" in this scheme regardless of where the talent lies.
Anyway point being, don't get into commercial music if you don't like it. There are plenty of ways to maintain artistic integrity as a trade off for money but these writers choose to sell out instead. So don't sell out and then whine about not being able to keep your integrity.
[+] [-] vagrantJin|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] akdor1154|5 years ago|reply
I wonder if we could ever see this in the west.
[+] [-] lowbloodsugar|5 years ago|reply
"Pop stars ask for share of future revenue from covers of songs they make famous."
"Producer who brings amazing sound to good lyrics asks for share of future revenue."