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In the text, interviews by the author are in the present tense (he “says”). Quotations drawn from supplementary material are in the past tense (he “said”).
STARTED WHEN the Boy got big enough to claim shotgun. No sooner seated up front than he reprogrammed the presets, changing my classic and alternative rock stations to contemporary hits radio, or CHR—what used to be called Top 40. I was irritated at first, but by the time we had crossed the Brooklyn Bridge and arrived at school, where he was a fifth-grader, I was pleased. Hadn’t I reconfigured my parents’ radio to play my music when I was his age? And since there are only so many times you can listen to the guitar solo in Pink Floyd’s “Comfortably Numb” without going a little numb yourself, I
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Like the Brill Building songs of my youth, the hits on the radio are once again “manufactured” by songwriting pros. The hit makers aren’t on the same team, but they collaborate and work independently for the same few A-list artists. Collectively, they constitute a virtual Brill Building, the place where record men go when they have to have a hit. The song machine.
A new song or two appeared, but for the most part the same tunes played ad nauseam. There were few ballads, and fewer rock songs. The music sounded more like disco than rock. I thought disco was dead. Turns out disco had simply gone underground, where it became House, only to eventually reemerge, cicadalike, as the backing track to the CHR music and to bludgeon rock senseless with synths. Weirdly, the only place I consistently heard new guitar-driven rock music was on the girl-power cartoon shows my youngest watched on Nick Jr. There, guitar gods were still aspirational figures, albeit for
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And yet it turns out that the same handful of top writers and producers are behind hit after hit—a mysterious priesthood of musical mages. They combine the talents of storied arrangers like Quincy Jones and George Martin, with the tune-making abilities of writer-producers like Holland–Dozier–Holland, Motown’s secret weapon. On the pop side, there’s Ryan Tedder, Jeff Bhasker, and Benny Blanco; on the urban side Pharrell Williams, Dr. Dre, and Timbaland. Bridging both genres are the über hit makers like Stargate, Ester Dean, Dr. Luke, and Max Martin.
the 13 million songs available for purchase in 2008, 52,000 made up 80 percent of the industry’s revenue. Ten million of those tracks failed to sell a single copy. Today, 77 percent of the profits in the music business are accumulated by 1 percent of the artists. Even
record the ticking of your radiator, that could be a sample too. The fact that the sounds and samples were often used without permission added outlaw glamour to the producers, many of whom were Jamaicans and African Americans living in New York City. One of the greatest of them, Afrika Bambaataa, sampled Kraftwerk (without permission) in his 1982 song “Planet Rock” combining the melody of “Trans-Europe Express” with the rhythm of Kraftwerk’s song “Numbers,” and those 808 beats. His Kraftwerk mashup birthed hip-hop.
Listening to Schlager gives you some notion of what American pop music might sound like without the African influence—in a word, cheesy.
Davis told the awed Swedes that he wanted to release their album in the United States but that it needed at least two more potential hits on it. He suggested recording a cover; the band objected, but eventually agreed to record “Don’t Turn Around,” an Albert Hammond and Diane Warren song, which became the album’s second single. Still Davis wasn’t satisfied. Wasn’t there something else? Berggren said he had been working on a new song, but it was for the band’s next album. Davis insisted on hearing it, and on a subsequent visit Berggren played it for Davis in his office. It was called “The
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“All That She Wants,” released as a single in the United States in September 1993, was a huge hit, although it only got as high as number two on the Billboard Hot 100 (it couldn’t dislodge “Dreamlover” by Mariah Carey). But “The Sign,” released in the United States in December 1993, was a historic smash. It spent six weeks at number one and was the top-selling single of the year. Remarkable in light of the fact that the band had virtually no following in the States, had never toured, and made music that was far from the reigning grunge sound. The album, which was also called The Sign, sold
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In the late 1940s, the record industry began to promote these groups under the label “rhythm-and-blues,” a term invented by a white Billboard writer, Jerry Wexler—later a partner in Atlantic Records—to replace the derogatory trade name “race music.” (He later regretted he hadn’t called the music “R&G,” for rhythm and gospel, instead; such R&B staples as falsetto singing and hand claps derived from gospel music.) R&B was, as Stuart Goosman points out in his 2005 book Group Harmony, a marketing term that became a badge of black musical identity. By definition, a black group would always be
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JIVE WAS THE label side of a music publishing company called Zomba, founded by Calder in London, in the early ’70s. Calder—who is and for the foreseeable future will be the single richest man the music business ever produced—started out as a bass player in several Motown cover bands in South Africa, in the 1960s.
The band was presented with a contract, which “their lawyer,” who had been hired by Pearlman, had already signed off on. There were some peculiar terms in it. For one thing, Pearlman was recognized not only as the band’s nominal manager (Johnny Wright was their actual manager), but also as a sixth Backstreet Boy, entitling him to participate in their record sales, merchandising, and touring income. When AJ’s mom balked, asking if she could take the contract back to Florida and have her own lawyer look it over, Pearlman told her this was a one-time offer, take it or leave it. In her memoir,
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A strong part of Denniz’s vision for the studio was that songwriting should be a collaborative effort; no one was supposed to be proprietary about his work. Songwriters would be assigned different parts of a song to work on; choruses would be taken from one song and tried in another; a bridge might be swapped out, or a hook. Songs were written more like television shows, by teams of writers who willingly shared credit with one another.
TRUE HIT FACTORIES HAVE occurred only rarely in the history of the record business, and they don’t last very long, for a variety of reasons. The hits stop coming, or competitors copy the factory’s sound, or listeners’ tastes change. Throughout the rock era, critical opinion and popular taste have turned against “manufactured music” at regular intervals. It happened in the mid-’60s with the Beatles and Stones, and again in the mid-’70s with the birth of punk, and it happened a third time in the early ’90s with grunge. Another common problem hit factories suffer is that the balance of power
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“My feeling was, where there’s McDonald’s, there’s Burger King,” Pearlman says over the phone from prison, “and where there’s Coke there’s Pepsi and where’s there’s Backstreet Boys, there’s going to be someone else. Someone’s going to have it, why not us?” So, without telling the Backstreet Boys, Pearlman had set about creating another boy band, which he eventually named ’N Sync.
DURING THE YEARS he worked as a program director at Top 40 stations around the country, Guy Zapoleon observed that popular music fads seem to move in a three-part cycle. Over time, he formulated a set of laws that, he believes, drives the pop cycle. It starts in the middle, with “pure pop.” This is the natural sweet spot for program directors, because it is the genre of music that draws in the largest number of listeners, boosting ratings. But pure pop eras inevitably give way to what Zapoleon calls “the doldrums,” when Top 40 becomes bland and boring, and ratings decline. In response, program
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Instead of the $10 to $12 of profit the companies had been enjoying on each CD, they got about 67 cents from a digital single. By shifting the standard unit of commerce from the album to the single, iTunes disemboweled the labels’ profit margin. There was a 12 percent drop in revenues from 2000 to 2002 (the Napster era), but a 46 percent drop in revenues from 2002 to 2010 (the iTunes era).
His name was Lukasz Gottwald, but in the clubs and on his mix tapes he was called Dr. Luke. Gottwald, twenty-eight, was also a guitar player; he had a regular gig with the house band for Saturday Night Live, a job he’d had for six years. He had an unusual range of musical skills. He had studied both rock and jazz, was a pretty good drummer, and he could sing, in a high voice. His job at SNL had acquainted him with a vast repertoire of American popular music, ranging over almost a century. As a producer, he knew his way around Pro Tools as well as anyone; he was as skilled at programming music
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bubblegum writer.’ ” After they had chatted for a while, Max played Davis a demo of the songs he and Dr. Luke had been working on, “Since U Been Gone” and “Behind These Hazel Eyes.” Max Martin had at first had Pink in mind for “Since U Been Gone,” but she turned it down. And he didn’t think Hilary Duff could sing the high parts. The Swede was hoping Davis would help “cast” the song with one of his rock-oriented artists, but Davis had someone else in mind: Kelly Clarkson. “Are you crazy?” Max replied heatedly. “Didn’t I tell you that I wanted this song to go to rock artists? That I didn’t want
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complement her voice beautifully. Davis was thrilled. Luke’s hard-edged rock guitar, combined with Max’s soaring choral melody, was exactly the pop-rock sound he had been looking for. He played the song, together with the other Max/Luke collaboration, “Behind These Hazel Eyes,” that Clarkson had recorded in Sweden, for the BMG international sales conference, which was attended by reps from all the territories worldwide where BMG sold records. They went nuts for both songs. A few days after the sales conference, Clarkson came to see Davis in his office. According to Davis, she began the meeting
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These days song promotion is mostly above board. The label doesn’t pay for individual songs; it pays the radio station for access to its program directors, so a promotions person can personally pitch the music. Labels also send stars to Clear Channel’s big Jingle Ball Christmas concerts on both coasts and cities in between from which the radio conglomerate profits handsomely in ticket sales (a practice sometimes called “showola”).
THE MID-2000S the track-and-hook approach to songwriting—in which a track maker/producer, who is responsible for the beats, the chord progression, and the instrumentation, collaborates with a hook writer/topliner, who writes the melodies—had become the standard method by which popular songs are written. The method was invented by reggae producers in Jamaica, who made one “riddim” (rhythm) track and invited ten or more aspiring singers to record a song over it. From Jamaica the technique spread to New York and was
has largely replaced the melody-and-lyrics approach to songwriting that was the working method in the Brill Building and Tin Pan Alley eras, wherein one writer sits at the piano, trying chords and singing possible melodies, while the other sketches the story and the rhymes. In country music, the melody-and-lyrics method is still the standard method of writing songs. (Nashville is in some respects the Brill Building’s spiritual home.)
In a track-and-hook song, the hook comes as soon as possible. Then the song “vamps”—progresses in three- or four-chord patterns with little or no variation. Because it is repetitive, the vamp requires more hooks: intro, verse, pre-chorus, chorus, and outro hooks. “It’s not enough to have one hook anymore,” Jay Brown explains. “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.” The reason, he went on, is that “people on average give a song seven seconds on the radio before they change the channel, and you got to hook them.”
the Stargate guys want to work in the same room with Rihanna, they have to travel to wherever she is, which they do not enjoy. Nor are the artists happy with this working arrangement, as it often means recording vocals late at night in mobile studios parked in trash-filled empty stadium parking lots that reek of urine after a show. But because the money is in ticket sales, not record sales, nonstop touring is the norm, and record making has to be fit into breaks in the grueling schedule.
Stargate then went to work putting Dean’s wailings into traditional song structure. Eriksen worked the box, using Pro Tools, while Hermansen critiqued the playbacks. On Eriksen’s Apple Cinema Display screen, small colored rectangles, representing bits of Dean’s vocal, glowed green, and he briskly chopped and rearranged them, his fingers flying over the keys, frequently punching the space bar to listen to a playback, then slicing and dicing some more. The studio’s sixty-four-channel mixing board, with its vast array of knobs and lights, remained idle, a relic of another age.
Nowhere are the production efficiencies of the track-and-hook method of writing better realized than in writer camp. A camp is like a pop-up hit factory. Labels and superstar artists convene them, and they generally last three or four days. The usual format is to invite dozens or more track makers and topliners, who are mixed and matched in different combinations through the course of the camp, until every possible combination has been tried. Typically, a producer-topliner pair spends the morning working on a song, which they are supposed to finish by the lunch break. In the afternoon new
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What does Eriksen think of Dean’s prospects as an artist? “A lot of writers want to be artists,” he replies cautiously. “Most of them can sing, and a lot of them can sing really well. But to be an artist, that’s another story. To be able to perform, to be the person everyone looks at when you walk into the room, with all the publicity and touring, and then to be able to get that sound on the record—that’s not easy. You can be a great singer, but when you hear the record it’s missing something.” What is that something? Eriksen thinks for a while. “It’s a fat sound,” he says,
DR. LUKE WAS TURNING FORTY. He liked to say that he loves the songs he makes because he has the musical sensibility of a twelve-year-old girl. But how long could his golden preteen taste endure? Hit making is a young man’s game. At some point, even if you’re Paul McCartney, you stop writing hits. And when the hits go away, they almost never come back.
latched on to Max, he could take it to another level.” Jarret Myer says, “You can’t overstate the influence Max had on Luke. One day he is remixing underground records, and the next day he is doing Kelly Clarkson. After Max, he had no inhibitions.” But Dr. Luke was also exactly what Max Martin needed. Gottwald had the knowledge to make the rock sound Martin Sandberg heard in his head. “He’s a better guitar player than me,” Max Martin remarked in Billboard. “He can travel in many worlds,” he added. “With his background as a guitar player, it seems within pop or rock, there’s nothing he’s not
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return, Max showed Gottwald how to make the melodies, and how to arrange and produce the vocals, which Max Martin could do at a genius level. Gottwald was a New York City guitar player who wanted to be a hit maker, and Max Martin was the former “sixth Backstreet Boy” who needed a new sound. They clicked.
KATHERYN ELIZABETH HUDSON WAS born in Santa Barbara, California, to evangelical Christian parents, in 1984. Her sheltered upbringing is far from the pop star whose bra squirts whipped cream in the video for “California Gurls.” But then again, when you compare swooning fans at Katy’s shows to home movies of her father, Pastor Keith, evangelizing in churches, as the congregation falls over, “slain in the spirit,” Katy doesn’t seem very far removed from her family at all.
Perry wrote “Waking Up in Vegas,” in 2003 with Andreas Carlsson, the Cheironite, working with super songwriter-producer Desmond Child. When the songwriters met with the artist for the first time, Child asked why her music sounded so serious, when her personality was so fun and bubbly. Carlsson recalled saying, “ ‘You have all this humor, and you’re a little bit crazy,’ and that’s when we started writing.” But their song wouldn’t make it onto a record for five more years.
Again there were murmurs of plagiarism. “I Kissed a Girl” happens to be the name of a 1995 song by folkie singer-songwriter Jill Sobule. Sobule’s song, a minor hit, is a clever tale of two women who in talking about their boyfriends end up getting it on. Sung by a gay artist, it comes across as a lesbian anthem, rather than as a tease to men, like Perry’s song.
terrifying Irene Richter, his majordomo. Dr. Luke was sipping a glass of the extremely powerful cold-pressed coffee that he kept in a half-gallon glass jug in the fridge. “I have crazy coffee,” he says. “It’s cold and black. We travel an hour to get this coffee.” He adds, “It’s all I have left,” making reference to the healthy California lifestyle he now pursues, his druggy New York days long behind him. “I can’t even smoke pot anymore. I get paranoid and start worrying about e-mails.”
There is an astonishing amount of music on Spotify. It’s a music nerd’s dream, which may be why the user population on Spotify tends to lie outside the mainstream. On Spotify, the Pixies’ top songs have about four times as many streams as Neil Diamond’s biggest hits.
Their “product vision,” in tech parlance, was that the service had to give the impression that the music was already on your hard drive. “What would it feel like?” Ek asks. “That was the emotion we were trying to invoke.” The key was to build something that worked instantly. Streaming, whether audio or video, tends to have built-in delays while you wait for the file, which is stored on a server in the cloud. But if the music starts in two hundred milliseconds or less—about half the time it takes, on average, to blink—people don’t seem to perceive a delay. That became Ek’s design standard.
Two artists who are part of that transition are Marc Ribot, an esteemed jazz guitarist, and Rosanne Cash, whose work has won two Grammys and received twelve nominations. Both are midlevel, mid-career musicians who are a vital part of the New York City music scene. Both have worked with major labels. The long tail is supposed to benefit artists like Ribot and Cash, and Spotify’s payment system is a good example of why it hasn’t, so far. You can spend all your Spotify time in the tail, listening to Ribot and Cash, but 90 percent of your subscription fee is still going to the megastars in the
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the past eighteen months, Ribot reported, his band made a $187 from 68,000 streams of his latest album, available on Spotify in Europe and the United States. Cash had made $104 from 600,000 streams. The math doesn’t fit Spotify’s benchmarks, but that is how their labels and publishers did the accounting.
reason for this, as one music publisher explains, is because “Basically, the major music corporations sold out their publishing companies in order to save their record labels. Universal Music Publishing took a terrible rate from streaming services like Spotify in order to help Universal Records. Which, in the end, means that the songwriter gets screwed.”
MAYBE SPOTIFY ITSELF will get obliterated. Apple, Amazon, and Google are all in the on-demand streaming market. Spotify’s advantage, Ek maintains, is its data and its ability to analyze that information. “We’ve been doing this for years,” he says. “And what we’ve built is the largest set of data of the most engaged music customers. I
Apple could pose a real threat to Spotify by preinstalling its service—Apple Music—on a future generation of iPhones and including the price of a subscription in the plan. Siri could be your DJ. That would ensure a paying user base in the hundreds of millions almost instantly, easily eclipsing Spotify’s.
According to a 2011 research project based on a fMRI study of people listening to music, familiarity with a song reflexively causes emotional engagement; it doesn’t matter what you think of the song. In “Music and Emotions in the Brain: Familiarity Matters,” lead author Carlos Silva Pereira and his collaborators write that familiarity is a “crucial factor” in how emotionally engaged listeners are with a song.
Dr. Luke insists that he and Max Martin wrote “Roar” first. The buzz over the controversy gave “Brave” a second chance on the charts, and it became a much bigger hit than it was the first time, featured in Microsoft tablet commercials, presumably because it took real bravery to purchase hardware from the creators of the Windows Phone and the Zune.