The Song Machine: Inside the Hit Factory

by John Seabrook

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 between the artists and the writers and producers tends to change over time. At the beginning, the artists are regarded as mere hired hands by the writers and the producers, who are the real artists in the operation. But with success, the artists come to feel that they are, in fact, real artists—everything about the way they are sold to the world confirms it. They demand, at a minimum, more respect from their songwriters and producers, and they usually insist on more creative control over the songs. Some want to write their own material, often with disastrous results.