Celeb News: Pop Music Business Exposed in Upcoming Book

Espresso

Quote:

The Song Machine: Inside The Hit Factory

The Atlantic Previews The Upcoming Book

Nathaniel Rich - October 2015

Quote:

Hit Charade

Meet the bald Norwegians and other unknowns who actually create the songs that top the charts.

The biggest pop star in America today is a man named Karl Martin Sandberg. The lead singer of an obscure ’80s glam-metal band, Sandberg grew up in a remote suburb of Stockholm and is now 44. Sandberg is the George Lucas, the LeBron James, the Serena Williams of American pop. He is responsible for more hits than Phil Spector, Michael Jackson, or the Beatles.

After Sandberg come the bald Norwegians, Mikkel Eriksen and Tor Hermansen, 43 and 44; Lukasz Gottwald, 42, a Sandberg protégé and collaborator who spent a decade languishing in Saturday Night Live’s house band; and another Sandberg collaborator named Esther Dean, 33, a former nurse’s aide from Oklahoma who was discovered in the audience of a Gap Band concert, singing along to “Oops Upside Your Head.” They use pseudonyms professionally, but most Americans wouldn’t recognize those, either: Max Martin, Stargate, Dr. Luke, and Ester Dean. [...]

Millions of Swifties and KatyCats—as well as Beliebers, Barbz, and Selenators, and the Rihanna Navy—would be stunned by the revelation that a handful of people, a crazily high percentage of them middle-aged Scandinavian men, write most of America’s pop hits. It is an open yet closely guarded secret, protected jealously by the labels and the performers themselves, whose identities are as carefully constructed as their songs and dances. The illusion of creative control is maintained by the fig leaf of a songwriting credit. The performer’s name will often appear in the list of songwriters, even if his or her contribution is negligible. (There’s a saying for this in the music industry: “Change a word, get a third.”) But almost no pop celebrities write their own hits. Too much is on the line for that, and being a global celebrity is a full-time job. It would be like Will Smith writing the next Independence Day. [...]

A short-attention-span culture demands short-attention-span songs. The writers of Tin Pan Alley and Motown had to write only one killer hook to get a hit. Now you need a new high every seven seconds—the average length of time a listener will give a radio station before changing the channel. “It’s not enough to have one hook anymore,” Jay Brown, a co-founder of Jay Z’s Roc Nation label, tells Seabrook. “You’ve got to have a hook in the intro, a hook in the pre, a hook in the chorus, and a hook in the bridge, too.”

Sonically, the template has remained remarkably consistent since the Backstreet Boys, whose sound was created by Max Martin and his mentor, Denniz PoP, at PoP’s Cheiron Studios, in Stockholm. It was at Cheiron in the late ’90s that they developed the modern hit formula, a formula nearly as valuable as Coca-Cola’s. But it’s not a secret formula. Seabrook describes the pop sound this way: “ABBA’s pop chords and textures, Denniz PoP’s song structure and dynamics, ’80s arena rock’s big choruses, and early ’90s American R&B grooves.” The production quality is crucial, too. The music is manufactured to fill not headphones and home stereo systems but malls and football stadiums. It is a synthetic, mechanical sound “more captivating than the virtuosity of the musicians.” This is a metaphor, of course—there are no musicians anymore, at least not human ones. Every instrument is automated. Session musicians have gone extinct, and studio mixing boards remain only as retro, semi-ironic furniture. [...]

Pop hitmakers frequently flirt with plagiarism, with good reason: Audiences embrace familiar sounds. Sameness sells. Dr. Luke in particular has been accused repeatedly of copyright infringement. His defense: “You don’t get sued for being similar. It needs to be the same thing.” (Dr. Luke does get sued for being similar, and quite often; he has also countersued for defamation.) Complicating the question of originality is the fact that only melodies, not beats, can be copyrighted. This means a producer can sell one beat to multiple artists. The same beat, for instance, can be heard beneath Beyoncé’s “Halo” and Kelly Clarkson’s “Already Gone,” hits released within four months of each other in 2009. (The producer, in his defense, claimed they were “two entirely different songs conceptually.”) As Seabrook notes, although each song was played tens of millions of times on YouTube and other platforms, few fans seemed to notice, let alone care.

Once a hit is ready, a songwriter must find a singer to bring it to the masses. The more famous the performer, the wider the audience, and the greater the royalties for the writer. Hits are shopped like scripts in Hollywood, first to the A-list, then to the B-list, then to the aspirants. “… Baby One More Time,” the Max Martin song that made Britney Spears’s career, was declined by TLC. Spears’s team later passed on “Umbrella,” which made Rihanna a star.

Hitmakers today don’t only create hits. They create “artists.” The trouble comes when successful performers believe their press and begin writing their own songs, or when songwriters try to become stars themselves. Taylor Dayne—who, against Clive Davis’s advice, demanded to write her own songs, and bombed—is a cautionary example of the former. Ester Dean, who has had mixed success as a solo act, is an example of the latter. “To be an artist, that’s another story,” says Mikkel Eriksen of Stargate. “You can be a great singer, but when you hear the record it’s missing something.” Esther Dean, a prolific writer of melodies and lyrics, is an artist, but Ester Dean is not making it as an “artist.” [...]

What is that ineffable something that separates pop stars from the rest of us? What is the source of Rihanna’s magical powers? Eriksen, trying to pin it down, describes it as “a sparkle around the edges of the words.” A K-pop star proposes another theory: “Maybe it is because of our great good looks?” Seabrook lands on a more subtle quality: an “urgent need to escape”—escapism as a matter of life or death. Rihanna was desperate to escape an abusive father; for Katy Perry it was her family’s repressive evangelical faith; for the Backstreet Boys it was Orlando. The perfect pop star creates a desire loop between audience and performer. We abandon reality together, meeting in a synthetic pop fantasy of California Gurls and Teenage Dreams. Only they are not really our teenage dreams. They are Karl Martin Sandberg’s.

Sabbath

Interesting

fememeist

HausOfCarlos

Well that's one of the things that ATRL actually already knows about.

Cain

Everyone on ATRL knows this tho

Miss me with that

I've heard of this! Sounds interesting but indeed nobody here will be surprised about the ~revelations.

AMENHOOKER

Quote:

There’s a saying for this in the music industry: “Change a word, get a third.”

DuckaDucka12

The part about how escapism is what separates pop stars from "normal" people is an interesting view

Dani97

Quote:

It is an open yet closely guarded secret, protected jealously by the labels and the performers

what???? since when????

anyway none of them are really good writers, i think they have an incredible ability to create catchy melodies.
I mean it's not surprise that Taylor's best lyrics are the ones for her previous 4 albums, even the best song on 1989, Clean, written and produced by Taylor and Imogen Heap.

musicman101

The last sentence....

It's pretty weird how the same 6 people (Max, Luke, The two that make up Stargate, Esther Dean, and Benny Blanco literally write and produce your fave's hit songs

Like most of the GP doesn't even know who they are, only pop music stans.... lol

LoKoPaNdA

I read this the other day and it was interesting. The music industry is indeed very closed. Also they're not slick for the Katy shade they threw in.

Icarus

The Katy drags

Buddy!

The shade

blaggot

buying this book when it comes out!

James Maslow

Quote:

Originally posted by AMENHOOKER

Quote:

There’s a saying for this in the music industry: “Change a word, get a third.”

Also this:

Quote:

The trouble comes when successful performers believe their press and begin writing their own songs, or when songwriters try to become stars themselves.

Retro

Quote:

It is an open yet closely guarded secret

What kind of absolutely ridiculous oxymoron?

We all know this. There have been articles recently that mean the portion of the GP that gives a flying **** knows this. Anyone who knows the first thing about the industry knows this. The fact that it's even considered an "exposé" is a tragedy.

alfonso12

This thread should be the answer to every "why is Katy Perry / Taylor Swift so successful?" thread.

starstruckaj

This isn't really new info, but it was an interesting read. Very telling of today's pop music landscape.

Jezang Looz

Quote:

Originally posted by Espresso

(There’s a saying for this in the music industry: “Change a word, get a third.”)

lmaoooooooo

Let me forward this to my fellow pop-conspirators

revel8

Quote:

Originally posted by Retro

What kind of absolutely ridiculous oxymoron?

We all know this. There have been articles recently that mean the portion of the GP that gives a flying **** knows this. Anyone who knows the first thing about the industry knows this. The fact that it's even considered an "exposé" is a tragedy.

I saw some music magazine writers slag off the claims in this article on twitter.

Music credits are there in black and white on every album. Max Martin just doesn't like giving interviews is all. It is hardly a secret that he co-writes a lot of hits.

Plus the author acts as if Motown never happened in the 60's.