The Songwriters Who Ate America (Part IV in A Series)

With a cameo by the North Korean army

Photo by Jake Kaminsky (Unsplash)

(Note: Billboard statistics are open to interpretation because Billboard is continually updating its list of categories and tweaking the inclusion criteria. The main pop categories are currently the Hot 100, which has been redefined periodically and includes stuff besides “pop,” and the Top 40, which is the quintessential pop chart. The way people listen to music has changed repeatedly, examples being the rise of albums and the advent of the internet. None of that changes the gist of this story.)

The first three parts of this series were about everything the U.S. does to keep out foreign artists to protect our movie and music industries.

So, what have those industries done with their relative freedom from competition? The same thing the Big 3 carmakers did during their heyday — they stopped innovating. It’s common for music fans of a certain age tocomplain about the state of popular music today, but they have a point: Most of it sounds the same. Ever wonder why?

The Gang of Eight

Can you name the songwriters with the most U.S. #1 hits in the history of the Billboard charts? Kudos if you guessed Paul McCartney and John Lennon. They occupy the #1 and #2 slots, respectively. But unless you are a pop industry nerd, you are unlikely to guess the #3 person on the list.

His name is Karl Martin Sandberg, and he is a middle-aged, failed hair-metal singer from Sweden. His professional moniker is Max Martin. Today, he is tied with John Lennon for #1s and will likely pass the late Beatle this year. His overall output of songs that have charted on Billboard is in the hundreds.

According to Celebrity Net Worth, Martin’s list of clients (with some of their hits) includes Backstreet Boys (“I Want It That Way”); Britney Spears (“Baby One More Time”, “You Drive Me Crazy”, “Oops!… I Did It Again”, “Lucky”, “Stronger”, “3”, “Hold It Against Me”); Celine Dion (“That’s the Way It Is”); Kelly Clarkson (“Since U Been Gone”, “Behind These Hazel Eyes”, “My Life Would Suck Without You”); P!nk (“So What”, “Please Don’t Leave Me”, “I Don’t Believe You”); Bon Jovi (“It’s My Life”); Avril Lavigne (“What the Hell”, “Smile”, “Wish You Were Here”); Katy Perry (“I Kissed a Girl”, “California Gurls”, “Teenage Dream”, “E.T.”, “Roar”, “Dark Horse”); Christina Aguilera (“Your Body”); Maroon 5 (“One More Night”); Taio Cruz (“Dynamite”); Justin Bieber (“Beauty and the Beat”); Taylor Swift (“We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together”); Ariana Grande (“Problem”).

This is just a partial list. He has also written for Usher, Ace of Base, ’NSync, Jonas Bros., Adele and Cher, among many others.

Martin is just the most successful of a small “club” of eight professional songwriters who have been the principle or sole writers of thousands of Billboard hits, including over 100 #1s. The others are Tor Erik Hermansen and Mikkel Storleer Eriksen (two Swedes who work as a team), Ester Dean, Bonnie McKee, Lukasz Gottwald, Karl Johan Schuster, and Benjamin Levin.

These eight account for about a quarter of all the songs that have made it onto the Billboard Pop or Adult Contemporary charts in the past 25 years. There have also been a handful of singer-songwriters who cracked the top ranks by writing material popularized by others. Barry Manilow and Joni Mitchell were early icons of this kind of success; Ed Sheeran and Drake are current high-profile examples. But they mainly remain famous for their own recordings. The Big 8, by contrast, only write for others.

Each of the Big 8 has a long list of clients. The lists frequently overlap. For example, Gottwald’s clients include Kelly Clarkson, Backstreet Boys, P!nk, Daughtry, Avril Lavigne, Lil Mama, Katy Perry, Flo Rida, Miley Cyrus, Adam Lambert, Taio Cruz, Ke$ha, Katy Perry, will.i.am, Shakira, and many others.

One writer who is not listed above started off as a singer-songwriter before spending four years just writing songs for other singers. She then resumed her career as a performer, but in those four years, Sia Furler racked up an amazing client list: Christina Aguilera (most of her album “Bionic” and a Golden Globe-nominated track for her movie); David Guetta (his biggest hit, “Titanium”); Flo Rida, Rihanna (her biggest hit, “Diamonds”); Ne-Yo; Rita Ora, Celine Dion, Jessie J, Britney Spears, Eminem (!); Beyonce, Lea Michele, Kylie Minogue, and Shakira, among others.

Furler resumed her career as a performing singer-songwriter, but her royalty stream from those four years of work dwarfs her take as a solo artist. In fact, each of these nine people is worth more than most of the stars for whom they write — Max Martin is worth over $400 million, entirely from song royalties.

These writers are so sought after that none of them are captive to any one label or studio, and some have started their own studios. They can turn complete unknowns into stars, as in the case of the Back Street Boys, Kelly Clarkson, and Rihanna, to name three.

But even the biggest stars lean heavily on them for what, in the modern era, we call “content.” Of course, said stars go to great lengths to create the impression they write all their own stuff.

How do they do it?

Some years ago, a young Israeli academic, Asaf Peres, wrote a Ph.D. dissertation on pop music composition and became obsessed with the subject. He continues to publish on the topic, has created an online course, “Top40 Theory,” to teach pop composition to aspiring writers, and is himself a topic of coverage in the music industry press.

Peres discovered a set of principles and songwriting “tools” that underlie the success of most of these top writers. Collectively, these tools are referred to as “Melodic Math.”

Melodic Math includes step-by-step instructions on how to write “hooks” — sequences of notes and rhythms that immediately plug into the listener’s brain; “earworms” — motifs that are so easy to remember that they get stuck in our heads; chords that evoke particular emotions such as happiness or anger; structures that provide resolution (when do you repeat a chorus? When do you play the same notes in sequence, and when do you reverse them?); “riffs” (short sequences of notes played on the instruments, that give a song impact and predictability); and so on.

Peres himself has become increasingly adamant that this is not a “formula” for writing hit songs. Unfortunately, that was the unmistakable message of his early work. It is hard to escape the conclusion that what he is talking about is, in fact, a formula or a bag of tricks that can be mastered even by people without deep musical training (several of the Big 8 songwriters listed above had little or no prior musical training). Peres is not the only academic studying this phenomenon: others have joined in the race to deconstruct songwriting methodology, but they all zero in on the same things.

The songwriters strenuously object to suggestions that their work is repetitive. This is belied by the frequency with which they get sued for plagiarism. They usually don’t lose because the standard for plagiarism is extremely stringent — change one note or accent, and you can get away with it. And in fact, they may not be copying at all. Maybe they are simply using rhythms and melodies that become inevitable when you use the same tool box repeatedly.

I decided not to post samples of any of their work because you’ve probably heard them enough. So instead, here is something that captures the spirit of a music industry reduced to mind-numbing uniformity. It’s weirdly mesmerizing, which is sort of the whole point:

The Assembly Line

Of course, not everyone is as good at using these tools as the nine people mentioned above. But they don’t have to be. There is a second tier of professional songwriters who are not quite as successful but nevertheless make a good living doing it. Many of them work in collectives, organized by labels or by the artists themselves, and mass-produce songs.

A songwriting session can consist of an all-day marathon involving a few dozen writers working from a set of prompts, not even at the same location.

Producers will coordinate this process, shuffling bits of completed tunes or lyrics from one writer to another. The bits are assembled by the head writers, who are in charge of putting the final song together.

If a specific singer commissioned the project, that singer may be in the room for the final assembly, and will get a songwriting credit for being there.

This picture must be horrifying for music snobs (yes, myself included). So, how can this possibly work? Many of us, in fact, instinctively sense the product of this sort of industrial songwriting and recoil from it. But we are not the audience for it, so we are asking the wrong question.

The real question is, how could it NOT work?

Melodic Math is not just about the sequences of notes and rhythms. It is about neuropsychology, the realization that certain patterns have certain effects on our nervous system. A lot of it has been validated in academic labs. In other words, this is the equivalent of selling heroin or crack. People who get hooked on crack will stop spending money on food in order to get another hit.

It’s easy for people who aren’t addicts to look down on people who are, but even the most dedicated of us snobs have guilty pleasures. Mine include ABBA, who invented many of the memes that Max Martin (their fellow Swede) distilled into his bag of joys. So, should we even care if the masses know what is happening? What’s the harm in giving in to the hook?

The Endgame

Here is the real problem: Anything that can be reduced to a set of rules and tools is low-hanging fruit for artificial intelligence. And lo and behold, songs and music videos have popped up that were generated by AIs.

One of them just blew up the internet before threats of legal action forced the major platforms (YouTube, TikTok, etc.) to take it down. Even the usually clueless Times ran an article on this story.

Here is a review, with most of the song embedded in the video:

I leave it to you to conjure up some scenarios for the future of popular music and music and art in general. Is the obsolescence of human artistry on the horizon? If you have some thoughts — whether triggered by this series or things you’ve been mulling over for some time, please share them here.

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Paula Wilson: These Five Songwriters Absolutely Dominate Pop Music… Yet You’d Probably Never Recognize Them In Person, 2014 https://www.celebritynetworth.com/articles/entertainment-articles/five-song-writers-important-people-pop-music-youve-never-heard/

How a Swedish hair-metal singer took over American pop music: Vox, 2015 https://www.vox.com/2015/10/7/9465815/max-martin-john-seabrook

“Hit Charade”, 2015, The Atlantic https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/10/hit-charade/403192/

John Seabrook, 2015 “The Song Machine” (available on Amazon https://www.amazon.com/The-Song-Machine-Inside-Factory/dp/0393241920)

“Top40 Theory” (Blog and online course based on “Melodic Math”, the study of Max Martin’s songwriting techniques) https://www.top40theory.com/home

How Max Martin’s songwriting techniques are used to write hit, after hit, after hit: Music Business Worldwide, 2023 https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/how-max-martins-songwriting-techniques-are-used-to-write-hit-after-hit-after-hit/

An A.I. Hit of Fake ‘Drake’ and ‘The Weeknd’ Rattles the Music World: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/19/arts/music/ai-drake-the-weeknd-fake.html