Why do modern pop songs have so many credited writers?

[refuse]

I happen to know someone in the music industry. Not huge, but you might have seen them on MTV and you've probably heard their hits.

They say modern songs get written by a huge group of songwriters in hotels. Individual words and phrases will earn credits. They go through the list of everything floating in the songwriters' heads and whittle it down on a huge whiteboard and anything put up there and put into the song gets credited. I think the phrase they used to describe it was "Shit Smoothie Song Writing."

The person I know hates this and doesn't work with these people but they know the industry, etc.

[hammock]

It’s called a writers room. Get a few songwriters you like in a room and jam together for a few hours. Typically everyone in the room splits the credit even if you were just breathing the air and lending a vibe.

Writers rooms and all the writers credits don’t begin to scratch the surface of ghostwriting, though.

Many popular songs are picked up from ghostwriters who are paid a flat fee and don’t even get a songwriter credit. Many songs

[samdafi]

This seems to be a corporate version of what I’ve witnessed: large groups of people getting together in vacation rentals or studios at writing camps and breaking off into small groups, each writing around a theme and passing ideas around fairly democratically, in a messy, creative, communal way. Then sharing and layering later. That leads to lots of contributors to one work of art, as they all reach for the best way to tell a story and fit it to a musical vibe that enhances it (or the other direction, it takes all kinds of approaches).

Never a whiteboard, so if that’s literally true I guess that environment would make me sad and disillusioned too, and I’m sorry your friend was dealing with it. But it’s certainly not the only model!

[andsoitis]

That process sounds easily automatable! I can’t wait for that to be unleashed so that human pop song writers can delve deeper.

[bodhiandphysics]

So there’s an interesting prehistory to all this. The us music industry began in the late 19th century… and this is before the record! music publishing and songwriting was literally publishing… of the sheet music. The standard form of this was as a piano score, and that’s the form that songwriters generally had copywrite on. Now if you were to perform this you would obviously need an orchestration, and this was subject to copywrite as well, but orchestrations were generally not published. An important thing to consider is that orchestration is a technical skill, and many great songwriters had limited formal training in music. So orchestration was almost always separate from songwriting. It still is on broadway; almost all great broadway composers outsourced orchestration (including composers like Richard Rogers, Gershwin, or Sondheim who were perfectly capable of writing it).

[brazzy]

twitch

Sorry, but since you used a phonetic misspelling twice, I suspect it's not a typo and you could benefit from being corrected.

It's copyright. The right to make or distribute copies of a work.

A copywriter is someone who writes texts for advertising or marketing.

[themadturk]

Many Hollywood composers outsource orchestration as well, often due to time constraints. John Williams is perfectly capable of orchestrating his work, but often doesn't. I understand he leaves very detailed notes for those who do, however.

[msla]

> The us music industry began in the late 19th century

Earlier than that, if you include minstrel shows as pop music, and they are. That's pre-Civil War.

[genewitch]

The answer to the question the article poses, FTA: Because the definition of "songwriting" has changed since the 1960s, and not just due to "sampling."

It's still a decent read, but if you want to argue the nuance, this is what the article says.

[whstl]

I assume you're talking about crediting beat makers, arrangers and producers rather than just the "traditional" way of crediting the people who come up with the melody and lyrics?

If so, I agree with an addendum: I think it's more about the "culture" around songwriting credits rather than the definition itself, as this was kind of always possible to do, and some people today still do the "old way". For example, back in the 60s/70s some bands like The Doors and Deep Purple would credit the whole band. And sometimes producers would also get credit, like Brian Eno with Talking Heads from the top of my head.

[yamtaddle]

Can't pull the tricks from The KLF's The Manual: How to Have a Number 1 the Easy Way to get free and uncredited songwriting work out of people anymore, then?

[bsder]

It's a simple answer: remuneration.

Songwriters get paid mechanical royalties, performance royalties, and synch fees anytime the song is used. Bands, for example, only get paid when their specific recording gets played.

Therefore, if something gets remixed, covered, etc. you want to be the songwriter, not the band.

[Buildstarted]

Reminds me of a story about Gene Roddenberry. (of Star Trek fame) Apparently he wrote lyrics to the original series theme song so that he'd get half the royalties every time it was played even though the lyrics weren't used. (Inside Star Trek: The Real Story, 1997, pp 178, 185)

[consumer451]

Simon Cowell is known to have played (and written the part for) instruments like the triangle on many of his associated bands' tracks so that he got an undeserved cut of the songwriting royalties.

[rock_hard]

You are spot on

Another factor here is that you never know which one of your or your teams songs will be a hit…and so many have a agreement to include eachother in their work

Little bit how VC funds work

[echelon]

Maybe this is how AI will work. Every contributor to the data set gets micropennies per inference century (a reasonable measure).

Of course future industrial foundational models will be bought and paid for (and royalty free) for the companies that assemble them.

[AlbertCory]

There's a cynical saying among traditional songwriters:

Change a word, get a third.

In other words, they give a song to some established star, who makes trivial changes and then claims partial songwriting credit.

Is that fair? I don't know. Publishing royalties are so massive that you have to expect people to try to get in on them. Robbie Robertson is notorious for claiming all the songwriting credits for The Band's songs. Was that fair? I don't know that, either.

[Dalewyn]

"You made this?"

"..."

"I made this."

[jerrre]

The problem is how to to decide whether the change was trivial, or the change was the thing that made a 100x difference in success.

[PeterisP]

Well, they should be free to use the earlier version without these changes, if they are trivial and not worth it.

[droptablemain]

Modern pop music is a more refined commercial industry than it was in the past. It's been sliding further and further away from art and toward the commercial. It is what it is.

[manachar]

"Art that doesn't sell is just a storage problem."

Had an artist tell me this once and it stuck with me ever since. He was referring to paintings, but has generally held for every other artistic endeavor.

Looking through history art has always been commercial - it's just the audience that changes.

For music, musicians who got paid used to be focused on the tastes of just the wealthiest folks who liked to go and be seen at symphonies. Nowadays, it's the artists who can fill stadiums (and get fans to buy lots of merch) that make the most bank. As such, it is often those musicians who provide a sellable brand that do best. To many, this can feel fake and plastic. But like any product designed for mass consumption, it's essential.

Looking at the symbiotic dance between artist and viewer/reader/listener is really something special, and helps to provide context for changes in trends.

You could be the best guitar player in the world, writing the best guitar solos of all time, but if you can't get people to pay for it, it's just a storage problem for your guitar.

[bazoom42]

When was pop music not commercial? Isn’t this basically the definition of pop music?

[JKCalhoun]

If there's been an indie/garage wave of music since grunge swept hair-metal out of the top 10 I guess I missed it. I had come to enjoy the reactionary waves of music like folk, punk, college-rock, grunge: the music that often started in small venues or at parties, that somehow broke through to find an large audience that were sick of the commercial dreck that studios and labels were pushing.

[zwieback]

For sure, but the trend for some teenager on TikTok skyrocketing to fame with a 100% homemade song is also a trend. A welcome one, in my opinion.

[scarface74]

The “Motown Machine” was a thing since the 60s where the artists didn’t matter as much as the writers, producers, choreographers, marketers etc

[lordfrito]

Same reason movie credits are now 20 minutes long

[andsoitis]

“Being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art.” — Andy Warhol

[davidgerard]

No. "Tin Pan Alley" was a cliche decades before pop as we know it started, and decades after it was a real place.

Pop musicians as auteurs is also a marketing choice.

[at-fates-hands]

One can make this argument based on the fact Tom McDonald's "Ghost" went to number 1 and he was the sole writer, producer and musician on the song.

Love him or hate him, he's still an anomaly as a 100% top to bottom independent artist. He often makes light of this in many of his video shorts.

[Tycho]

It’s funny how many contributions to classic records are uncredited, eg. the opening riff of My Girl.

[ChuckMcM]

from https://sonosuite.com/en/blog/music-royalties-explained-the-... :

Mechanical Royalties: Refers to the payment made to songwriters whenever one of their copyrighted musical compositions is distributed or reproduced in both physical and digital formats.

My wife's cousin produced Music in NYC for a long time, he explained that of all the ways you got paid for Music being played, distributed, or sold, the songwriters got the biggest cut.

It was songwriters who sued "remixers" for a cut of the royalties based on the mechanical royalties clause of music copyright. They get the most money, they had the most to lose from creating a "loophole" based on sampling, so they prosecuted anyone who didn't credit them as a songwriter on their song if they had resampled something recognizable.

[Nekhrimah]

The movie Yesterday has a relevant plot point. Late in the film, when Jack is putting out another album of Beatles music he really wants it to be called Abbey Road, but the modern music publishers decide that it will be titled "One Man Only". Because of this exact phenomenon!

[VoodooJuJu]

So my brother, my cousin, my uncle, his friend, and his son can all get paid. EZ money EZ life.

[forevergreenyon]

call me old school, but it doesn't make sense to me that people get to live off the work done once, then repeated (recreated or reproduced by technology) while the 'creator'

in practice whomever owns the 'licenses' continues to collect payment for what the technology does (namely: machine-based repetition/reproduction)

I guess this is the way NFTs can make real sense: when whomever owns the NFT receives auto-blockchain royalty payments for the underlying asset (if/when the blockchain system gets political support)

[jdmtheNth]

Less talent, more people thinking their contributions are worth mention.

[omar_alt]

I can’t think of a song chorus or a phrase that has endured in the last decade. If it was a gameshow question to complete the lines from these contemporary songs how many would struggle?

[bolanyo]

Do you think that maybe you are biased by being older than you were in previous decades, and thus spending less time and less emotional investment on pop music? Or do you honestly believe that the quality of a whole art form has dropped significantly during this period?

[fsckboy]

i realize it's slightly more than 10 years ago, but c'mon, "ma ma ma ma poker face, pa pa pa poker face" is not enduring?

seriously though, if you think a healthy music industry is a valuable thing for a culture, it's actually better if old stuff does not endure because it creates openings for new, young, living artists. There is great boredom in the world of classical music at the constant repetition of Bach, Beethoven and Mozart. They've been decomposing for many multiples of the years they were composing.

(side note: I'm not saying there's no sexism in Hollywood, but a similar case can be made for one aspect of their sexist practices: pushing older actresses aside creates more roles for a greater number of new actresses, more women get employed overall (weighted by the number of male vs female roles overall). Up and coming male actors get stifled by the dominance of already existing stars.)

[skripp]

That pretty much means your old. :-) How about: "I came in as a wrecking ball"? Or "I'm in love with your body." from the absolutly horrible song "Shape of you"?

[oneoff786]

There are gameshows like this, and contestants do just fine.

[ergonaught]

Because everything great and worthwhile has always been designed by committees.

[f0ld]

Tax evasion. Why did ABBA wear such funny looking garments? - also tax evasion.