The Elaborate Charade to Obfuscate Who Writes Pop Music
This fascinating article from The Atlantic reads like an episode of Black Mirror:
Impressionable young fans would do well to avoid John Seabrook’s (new book) The Song Machine, an immersive, reflective, and utterly satisfying examination of the business of popular music. It is a business as old as Stephen Foster, but never before has it been run so efficiently or dominated by so few. We have come to expect this type of consolidation from our banking, oil-and-gas, and health-care industries. But the same practices they rely on—ruthless digitization, outsourcing, focus-group brand testing, brute-force marketing—have been applied with tremendous success in pop, creating such profitable multinationals as Rihanna, Katy Perry, and Taylor Swift.
The music has evolved in step with these changes. 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.
Orlando’s Lou Pearlman apparently has a lot more to answer for than the criminal schemes he’s presently serving time for.
Side story: in the mid-’90s I once wandered into a downtown Orlando pizza place to grab a quick slice and noticed Pearlman at a table with a large pie in the middle, and four teenage boys sitting across looking wide-eyed and attentive. I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall.
Update: Vox interviews John Seabrook about his book and the ‘mega-producer’ phenomenon:
When you’re talking about the Swedes, and to a certain extent the Norwegians, there you’re dealing with a different set of cultural influences. There’s this whole concept, from a novel in the 1930s, called Jantelagen, the laws of Scandinavian restraint. The idea is that individual success is to be frowned upon in Scandinavian culture, and it’s really about the group and not the individual. That particular set of influences was very instrumental in shaping Denniz Pop and his group of disciples, of whom [leading mega-producer] Max Martin was obviously the most successful. It’s a major force in Max Martin’s career.
What’s the difference between the Beatles and Max Martin, really? You could say the Beatles’ songs are maybe a little bit better, but that’s a very subjective judgment. The real difference is that the Beatles perform their own songs and that’s why the Beatles are universally recognized as geniuses, whereas Martin never performs his own songs, and that’s why outside the music industry, nobody knows who Max Martin is. It’s a hard thing for most Americans to wrap their minds around, but if you look at it in a Swedish context, it makes a little more sense.
Update 2: Bob Lefsetz reviews Seabrook’s The Song Machine: Inside The Hit Factory:
They don’t sit in studios with guitars and pianos, writing melodies and lyrics together. At best, they do that in Nashville. Rather producers come up with beats and then they have their favorite topliners create melodies and hooks on top. And if there aren’t enough hooks in the track, they start all over. They’re in the business of hit singles, not album dreck. And they know one hook is not enough, that you’ve got to grab the public instantly and continue to thrill them.
And this formula is working.
I’m not judging it, just telling you how it is.
All the people truly driving popular culture are in this book. That’s why you should read it. And that’s why you’re gonna hate it.
Inspiration Or Appropriation?
NPR:
Where do you draw the line between inspiration and appropriation when it comes to musical compositions? That question is at the heart of several high-profile court cases, including the recent “Blurred Lines” trial and a current copyright-infringement lawsuit involving “Stairway to Heaven.” But it isn’t always easy to prove a song is yours – particularly when you’re up against one of the biggest rock and roll bands of all time.
But proving a song is yours isn’t always easy, says leading music attorney Ken Anderson. “The first step is establishing ownership,” Anderson says. “That means that the material is original to you, meaning you’re the one who created the material.” [He] says you also have to show that the accused had access to your material.
“We listen to the music if it’s recorded, or we study it if it’s only in written form,” says [musicologist Judith Finell, who has testified in many high-profile cases]. “And usually, we transcribe any section of that music if it sounds similar to the other music we’re comparing it to. Then we start to determine if they have similar pitches in common, similar rhythms. What is it that makes them sound related?”
This is a fun radio piece from NPR, which does focus mostly on Led Zeppelin’s infamous ‘appropriations.’ I wouldn’t put the “Blurred Lines” case in the same category as “Stairway To Heaven”, though … I see some merit in the latter, but, personally, not much in the former. (As I tweeted to a friend the week that the “Blurred Lines” lawsuit went for the plaintiff, “I wonder what the Bob Marley estate is thinking right now.”)
I’ve recently been doing some consulting work for a well-known songwriter, and a recent top 40 hit by an unrelated artist contains a melody line that is suspiciously similar to one of hers. The artist in question (or, more likely, his label) was proactive in that he gave my client shared songwriting credit, but without contacting her. We found out through online press that the song received. No one here is upset – the similar part is brief, and my client is happy for the extra royalty that should come in – but this practice of preventively crediting songwriters that may or may not have been intentionally appropriated is new to me. It’s probably a lot more common than I know, mainly due to the issues raised in the NPR piece.