By John Seabrook
I don´t remember the last time a book had me caught lately. Perhaps it has to do with my natural interest in the music industry. The Song Machine is a journey through the world of pop music, seen throughout the eyes of The New Yorker's journalist John Seabrook. It is certainly the book that I would have liked to read a few years ago, when my interest in the pop music's song-making process was at its peak.
Seabrook recounts the story of those who helped to create the modern global music industry, from producers Max Martin, Dr. Luke, The Matrix and more, artists such as Katy Perry, Britney Spears and Rihanna, to music executives such as Clive Calder, Lou Pearlman and many other institutions that comprise the very esence of what we hear today in commercial radio.
For those involved in music.
My Rating: 10/10
Click Here to Read My Notes
I don´t remember the last time a book had me caught lately. Perhaps it has to do with my natural interest in the music industry. The Song Machine is a journey through the world of pop music, seen throughout the eyes of The New Yorker's journalist John Seabrook. It is certainly the book that I would have liked to read a few years ago, when my interest in the pop music's song-making process was at its peak.
Seabrook recounts the story of those who helped to create the modern global music industry, from producers Max Martin, Dr. Luke, The Matrix and more, artists such as Katy Perry, Britney Spears and Rihanna, to music executives such as Clive Calder, Lou Pearlman and many other institutions that comprise the very esence of what we hear today in commercial radio.
For those involved in music.
My Rating: 10/10
Click Here to Read My Notes
PRIOR TO DENNIZ POP, hit songs in the United States and the UK, the world’s two largest music markets, had come almost exclusively from American and British songwriters and producers, along with the occasional Aussie. New directions in popular music often combined American and British elements. A new beat would emerge in the States from black music and make its way to the UK, where the heavy rhythmic grooves would be sweetened with progressive European melodies. Then the music would return to the States and mainstream chart success. It was a global conversation about African and European culture, transacted in song.
But those were performing acts. Denniz’s vision was entirely different: a factory of Swedish writers and producers who would create hits for British and American artists.
The trick was to come up with a melody that worked with the beat, not against it.
In the United States, melody was kept at arm’s length by the DJs who were the producers of house music, because in the clubs, whenever a strong melody came over the speakers, the dancing stopped. But in Sweden, it was different. As Jan Gradvall observes, “In discos in small towns all over Sweden in the ’80s, people danced to the biggest hit song rather than the funkiest songs or best mixes. When the chorus came around, that’s when the dance floor boiled. Those kind of choruses, not unlike those of songs sung in hockey arenas or soccer stadiums, have always been loved in Sweden. So when Denniz PoP and the others DJed at these places, they realized the importance of BIG choruses.”
In a documentary that appeared on Swedish national television (STV) in 1997, Denniz told a reporter, “It’s easy to say producing this music is equal to pushing a button in the studio. But that’s like saying writing a novel is a simple push of a button on your typewriter.”
Denniz liked to say that no matter how technically adept you were at programming, sometimes you just had to “let art win.”
No matter how successful Denniz became, this critique would continue to dog him: programming music required less skill than playing it.
he knew that one of the keys to popular success in the United States was making songs that sounded good in the car.
ABBA took the flowing melodic element in Swedish folk songs and hymns (even the national anthem, “Thou Ancient, Thou Free,” sounds a bit like a pop song) and added elements of Schlager music, the Polka-based European popular music from the ’50s and ’60s, most often heard in German.
Listening to Schlager gives you some notion of what American pop music might sound like without the African influence—in a word, cheesy.
An air of melancholy pervades the superficially happy-sounding ABBA songs, another uniquely Swedish quality that would cast a long shadow over the future of pop music. Their happy songs sound sad, and their sad songs that sound happy. They appeal to listeners in a broad variety of moods.
ABBA showed that teen pop could be about adult subjects. Both “When All Is Said and Done” and “The Winner Takes It All” are about Björn and Agnetha’s and Benny and Anni-Frid’s respective divorces, and there they are in the videos, singing about their mutual pain together onstage. That’s not something you saw every day in the pop world.
In addition to ABBA’s influence, contemporary Swedish songwriters speak of growing up with the music that accompanied the popular Pippi Longstocking TV series that ran on Swedish TV in the late ’60s and early ’70s, and was later dubbed (badly) into English. In particular the theme song, “Here Comes Pippi Longstocking,” written by Jan Johansson, and also the jazz musician Georg Riedel’s contributions to the series, have a sweet-sad sort of innocence about them that would later inform many a Swedish-made Billboard hit.
Klas Åhlund, a Swedish songwriter and producer in his forties, who is also a performer (in the rock band Teddybears), says: “Swedes are very musical, and they love to write songs. But it’s a big country, and it has very few people in it. So you had these farmers out there who were good at writing songs, but had no one to sing them. Songwriting was just a thing you did on your own when you were watching the cows, a kind of meditation. You didn’t focus as much on your ability as a performer as you did on the structure and craft of the songs. Which is really not the case in the US, where your charm and your voice and your powers as a performer come immediately into play.”
As Denniz once said, in response to a question about how hard could it possibly be to write such simple songs, “it’s much more difficult to make it simple, especially achieving a simplicity without having it sound incredibly trivial.”
” As Denniz put it, “A great pop song should be interesting, in some way. That means that certain people will hate it immediately and certain people will love it, but only as long as it isn’t boring and meaningless. Then it’s not a pop song any longer; then it’s something else. It’s just music.”
Martin Dodd, who was head of A&R at Mega Records, says, “Denniz had a childlike wonder about him, and was a very social being, which reflected strongly in the music, where nothing was ever allowed to be “nice” or boring; absolutely every note, word, and beat had to have purpose or be fun.”
Lyrics that command too much attention are likely to kill the dancing.
And Dylan not withstanding, song lyrics don’t need to be poetry; they need only to tell you what you are supposed to feel when you hear the music they accompany.
In addition to working rhythmically, the sound of the words had to fit with the melody, an approach to songwriting that Denniz’s great protégé, Max Martin, would later call “melodic math.”
“I think it was to our advantage that English was not our mother language,” Ekberg says, “because we are able to treat English very respectless, and just look for the word that sounded good with the melody.” Freed from making sense, the lyricists’ horizons are boundless.
Davis comes from a time when A&R really did involve both artists and repertoire—discovering and developing artists and choosing the songs for them to sing, because in the pre-rock era it was not expected that the singers would write their own material.
However, as Pearlman wrote in his 2003 how-to-be-a-millionaire memoir, Bands, Brands, and Billions, “As I told the Jordache brothers, their name was all over the news that night.”
He quizzed Dick Scott and Maurice Starr on the New Kids’ business model. “They told me exactly how it worked, the marketing of it. Our target market was always going to be young teenage girls, because boys are into sports, and they like buying jerseys and caps and so on, for baseball or football, things of that nature, whereas the girls are totally enthralled with the band. . . . They don’t have money, but they have access to a large supply of it: their aunts, uncles, grandmas, grandpas, who would spend money on them for a concert or merchandise sooner than they would spend it on themselves.”
The word on the street about the New Kids, Artie confided to his cousin, was that not all of them could actually sing. Maurice Starr himself sang on a lot of their records, it was said.
No other city in the world is more dependent on popular culture than Orlando, and while it wasn’t hard to find kids in any town who had mainlined pop culture by growing up in front of MTV, only Orlando offered a lot of young people whose job was to bring pop culture characters to life. In addition, Orlando was blessed with a ready supply of talent scouts, vocal and dance coaches, and experienced star makers who could help a neophyte like Pearlman assemble and train a pop group.
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.
A musical act is a small entrepreneurial business. Making a hit requires a lot of different services that not all bands can provide for themselves. Calder was looking for acts that would accept his involvement and partnership. A music-industry insider told Billboard, “The idea of a rock group that is self-contained, produces itself, and does all that is not the kind of business model that he tends to join with. It’s not that he wouldn’t be able to have success with Creed or Korn or Limp Bizkit—I just don’t think it’s where his business model is. It’s more, ‘I’ll sign this artist, I’ve got this producer, they’ll record in my studio.’ ”
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.
The Swedish artist E-Type (Bo Martin Erik Eriksson) recalled, “I get this feeling of a big painter’s studio in Italy back in the 1400s or 1500s.”
In a STV documentary, The Nineties, he told producer Jens von Reis, “One assistant does the hands, another does the feet, and another does something else, and then Michelangelo walks in and says, ‘That’s really great, just turn it slightly. Now it’s good, put it in a golden frame and out with it.
In assembling his team, Denniz PoP sought out protégés with different skill sets. E-Type said, “I mean, I had been around to a bunch of different record studios and everyone said, ‘You’re nuts, what would we do with you . . . ? You’re not good-looking, you can’t sing, and you write really strange songs.’ Dagge told me the opposite: ‘How fun that you look so odd, and sound so strange, and make music that I believe could become something in the future.’
Andreas Carlsson was a gifted lyricist. Lundin had excellent technical skills. Jörgen Elofsson was adept at flowing melodies, while Rami Yacoub, a later Cheiron recruit, made sick beats. But of all the talents Denniz gathered around him, no one could match the genius for crafting melodies that fit both dance tracks and ballads possessed by the babyfaced, long-haired metalhead named Karl Martin Sandberg.
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.
Spector not only changed pop music; he also established an archetype: the driven, obsessive, autocratic producer, who will stop at nothing to get the sound he hears in his head onto a record, even if it means screwing over his collaborators.
“We’ve Got It Goin’ On” showcased for the first time the genre-busting combination of influences that converged in Max Martin. The song combines 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. On top of all that is Max’s gift for melody, which is timeless, and owes as much to Edvard Grieg’s dark Norwegian musical fable “In the Hall of the Mountain King” (aka the Inspector Gadget theme song) as to any contemporary influence.
Savan Kotecha, who co-wrote with Max Martin “DJ Got Us Fallin’ In Love,” a number-one smash, and apprenticed in the Cheiron songwriting method, thinks this quality is uniquely Swedish. “With the Swedish people, what is expected to happen is going to happen,” he says. “A Swede will not let you down, and neither do their songs. If you expect the song to blow here, it will blow here, and if you expect it to be chill there, it’s chill there.”
IT HAD TAKEN LONGER than expected for the Backstreet Boys to break through in their own country, but Lou Pearlman hadn’t been idle while waiting. He figured it was inevitable when the group finally did take off that someone else would come along and piggyback off their success by offering a product that was basically the same but just different enough to gain market share. “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.
As the principal of the “Mickey Mouse School,” Chuck Yerger, later recalled in Britney: Inside the Dream by Steve Dennis, “In all that she did, Britney gave the distinct impression that if an adult says do something, you do it. She truly felt that all adults and people in authority were good people, who had her best interests at heart.”
Dancing, it turned out, was the teenager’s passion: Jive had no idea.
Meanwhile, as Britney was blowing up around the world, the Backstreet Boys came out with their album Millennium in May 1999. The first single, a midtempo ballad called “I Want It That Way,” is arguably the prettiest of all Max Martin’s tunes.
Andreas Carlsson wrote, “One rainy day in the fall, a man dressed in a mink coat showed up with his private chauffeur and umbrella. The man was Tommy Mottola. . . . He had taken his private jet to Stockholm to talk business in hope of taking part of the Cheiron phenomena. His arrival had not been taken seriously, so when he arrived there was nobody in the studio. People had gone to dinner or the movies. This didn’t happen because we were rude, but more that we did not need the world around us, however the world around needed us.”
In his book, Carlsson recalled a remark from Def Leppard’s Phil Collen, who “explained the phenomena . . . in a very comprehensive way: ‘Everybody else started becoming better at being Def Leppard than us.’ ”
No one was having a better year than Jive in 2001. In fact, few record companies, major or independent, have ever had a year like Jive had in 2001. It owned the teen pop market, a remarkable transformation for a company that started out in the United States as a rap label.
As Zomba creative director Eric Beall puts it, “Clive was probably the most strategic person I’ve ever met in the industry. Nothing was a random, one-off decision. Everything was part of a larger plan. Sometimes at A&R meetings he would review the monthly schedule of Britney or Backstreet Boys, and on the fly would completely rework the thing in a way that he felt was more strategic and efficient. Amazing to watch how his mind worked. He truly was always three steps ahead of everyone else in the room.”
Steve Lunt says, “Actually, it was very sad. Clive didn’t want to sell the company, but he felt he had to.” There had always been a conflict between the music lover and the businessman in Calder, but people who had bet that Calder’s heart lay with the music usually lived to regret it.
In a parting e-mail to the staff, Calder, ever prescient, pointed the way toward the future of pop music and articulated the record industry’s guiding philosophy and way forward: “HIT RECORDS ARE MADE IN THE RECORDING STUDIO.”
The music business slowly changed from an art-house business run by men with ears into a corporate enterprise of quarterly earnings and timely results. But corporate culture is not conducive to musical talent.
Chris Blackwell says, “I don’t think the music business lends itself very well to being a Wall Street business. You’re always working with individuals, with creative people, and the people you are trying to reach, by and large, don’t view music as a commodity but as a relationship with a band. It takes time to expand that relationship, but most people who work for the corporations have three-year contracts, some five, and most of them are expected to produce. What an artist really needs is a champion, not a numbers guy who in another year is going to leave.”
And controversy, a pop star’s wingman, is almost never good for the corporate image.
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 directors row away from pure pop, toward the more perilous waters Zapoleon calls “the extremes,” in order to restore excitement to their stations. The extremes—alt-rock and hip-hop—attract younger listeners, always a desirable demographic for the advertisers (who, in a business sense, are a commercial station’s real constituency), but repel older ones, and so program directors begin rowing back toward the pure-pop mainstream, and the cycle starts again.
“What’s going on with this show Pop Idol, Peter?” he asked, according to Bill Carter’s 2006 book Desperate Networks. “It’s a big hit in England. I spoke to Liz and she says it’s great.” “We’re still looking at it,” Chernin replied. “Don’t look at it,” Murdoch shot back. “Buy it! Right now.”
In spite of the triumph of teen pop in the late ’90s, the word still carries with it an element of guilty pleasure in the United States. The reasons for this are complicated (my book NoBrow is an attempt to explain them at length), but suffice it to say that Americans, lacking a class system within which to situate themselves, turn to culture to find their rank in society, and pop doesn’t usually secure the status that more artistically prestigious fare offers. Only Michael Jackson could call himself the King of Pop and make the title sound like an honorific.
The show, which was supposed to be about finding talent, turned out to be about humiliating the talentless in front of a national audience. Somehow the contestants and their parents had missed that memo.
And then Clarkson went out and sang “A Moment Like This,” a new song by Cheironite Jörgen Elofsson and John Reid, written specially for the show’s finale. As the final chorus rolled around, you sensed that the song was building toward an emotional climax that people in the record business sometimes refer to as “the money note.”
The money note is the moment in Whitney Houston’s version of the Dolly Parton song “I Will Always Love You” at the beginning of the third rendition of the chorus: pause, drum beat, and then “IIIIIIEEEEEEIIIIII will always LOVE you.” It is the moment in the Celine Dion song from Titanic, “My Heart Will Go On”: the key change that begins the third verse, a note you can hear a hundred times and it still brings you up short in the supermarket and transports you from the price of milk to a world of grand romantic gesture--
Kelly hit the money note in “A Moment Like This”—the key change in the final chorus—in full cry, a chill-making moment. And when she was crowned the following night, and Justin gave her a big hug, it was pure TV magic.
And yet, Davis wrote, for all Clarkson’s subsequent worldwide success, “Was there ever any personal acknowledgment from her that I had been right?”
The copycat talent shows that appeared on other networks—The Voice, X Factor (another Simon Cowell production), and America’s Got Talent, among others—haven’t produced a superstar either. Leading one to conclude that while a TV talent show can help get an artist noticed, it can’t make a recording star. Only a record man can do that.
TEENS HAVE HISTORICALLY provided hit factories with a ready market, but they also stamp the hit makers with an expiration date. Teens don’t remain teens for long, and the next cohort is keen to differentiate themselves from their elders, particularly from their older brothers and sisters. Musical preferences work well for that: you hate the music your older sibling likes, simply because she likes it. In this way, the hit factories’ successes have a built-in backlash; even Cheiron couldn’t avoid it. The rock era greatly amplified this backlash, because it allowed the younger Beatles and Stones–loving teens not only to despise their older sibs’ Brill Building records but also to feel morally superior in preferring “real” music sung by singer-songwriters to “manufactured” music sung by hired performers.
Henceforth his stars would be made, not born, using a sophisticated system of artistic development. Lee took Lou Pearlman’s idea of putting together different personality types in a singing group and made a musical Samsung out of it, employing a method of cultural production Lee called “cultural technology.”
In a 2011 address at Stanford Business School, he explained, “I coined this term about fourteen years ago, when SM decided to launch its artists and cultural content throughout Asia. The age of information technology had dominated most of the nineties, and I predicted that the age of cultural technology would come next.” He went on, “SM Entertainment and I see culture as a type of technology. But cultural technology is much more exquisite and complex than information technology.”
“Bridging the gaps with collaborations can be the start of a global phenomenon,” Swizz told The Fader, a music magazine.
Touring, which the label was counting on the Girls to do, could also be a problem. In Korea, record promotion is built almost entirely around television appearances. In Seoul you see members of Girls’ Generation on TV every night. In the U.S., with the exception of awards shows, which are infrequent, there are few prime-time TV formats for promoting pop music; artists must rely on radio and concert tours to build a mass following.
“Jimmy always says it’s all about the connection between the artist and the fans,” he says.
In the end, as Denniz PoP used to say, sometimes you have to let art win.
In the early 2000s, the partners began to expand their business. Instead of just writing songs, they started looking for artists. “We felt like we’d built up all this knowledge over the course of our careers,” Sturken says, “both as artists and as songwriters, about what it takes to be a star, and we might as well put it to good use.” The plan was to sign an artist to a production deal, develop his or her sound, and attempt to broker them to a major label.
LIKE BRITNEY SPEARS AND Kelly Clarkson, Robyn Rihanna Fenty experienced a childhood fraught with parental discord, a violent domestic nightmare from which fame seemed to offer safe harbor.
Fenty didn’t write songs, or play an instrument; she had never had any formal training in either voice or dance before meeting Rogers. Her main qualification as a singer was that she wanted to be one so badly. Rogers sensed that ambition ran deep—“I saw it in her eyes,” he says. But what was “it,” exactly? No mere girlish desire for fame; it was more likely a much more urgent need to escape from the anxieties of a violent home life into the illusion of security and boundless love that a life onstage seemed to offer. That desire, more than any inborn talent, is what fans will connect to, and that is what record men look for in a new artist. It’s the one thing they can’t manufacture.
For Jay-Z, Brown explained, “you’ve got to be bigger than the song, otherwise the song dictates to you.”
According to Kuk Harrell, the secret of their success is that they approach songs like they are jingles. “We all learned from an early age to approach music as a business,” he explains.
You’re like an athlete—like, what pressure? You are there to perform.”
Harrell describes how the song came to be. “I was fooling around with Logic,” he says, “trying to learn it, and I had gone into the samples and found this high-hat loop, which I put on a beat. Cha chick cha bun tha smoth,” he mouths, making the percussion sounds with his breath and lips. “Then Tricky comes in and says, ‘What’s that?’ ” Stewart sat down at a keyboard and started playing chords into the box, over the looped high hat and snare sound. Then he programmed a bass line. At that point Dream came into the studio, listened to the track, and the word “umbrella” popped into his head. He went into the vocal booth and got on the mike, singing “Under my umbrella.” And then, inspired, added the all-important echoes—“ella ella ella eh eh eh”—that became the song’s signature hook.
Big Radio is still the best way—some would argue, the only way—to create hits. If the song seems to be playing everywhere at the same time, all at once, so that Zapoleon’s Rule of Three is fulfilled in a day or so, it is perceived to be a hit, and becomes one.
Radio is integral to the survival of the old hit-making mentality.
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.
Radio needs music that’s compelling enough to keep people listening through the ads, and the record companies need radio to sell records.
“Umbrella” marked the arrival of something new in pop: a digital icon. In the rock era, when the album was the standard unit of recorded music, listeners had ten or twelve songs to get to know the artist, but in the singles-oriented world of today, the artist has only three or four minutes to put their personality across, and at that Rihanna would prove to be without peer. She seems to release a new single each month, often recording the latest while she is on an eighty-city world tour promoting the previous ones. To keep her supplied with songs, her label and her manager periodically convene “writer camps”—weeklong conclaves, generally held in Los Angeles, where dozens of top producers and writers from around the world are brought in and shuffled and reshuffled in pairs over multiple-day writing sessions, in the hope of striking gold.
BY 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 employed in early hip-hop. The Swedes at Cheiron industrialized it. Today, track-and-hook has become the pillar and post of popular song. It 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.) But in mainstream pop and R&B songwriting, track-and-hook has taken over, for several reasons.
In the melody-and-lyrics approach to songwriting, a song generally begins with a melody, or with lyrics, and a rough sketch of the song is worked out by the composers before the production is done. In track-and-hook, the production comes first, and then melody and words are added. Often producers are not looking for a single melody to carry the song, but rather just enough melody to flesh out the production. That’s why producers generally speak of a song’s “melodies” rather than its melody.
As a working method, track-and-hook tends to make songs sound the same. Dance music producers have always borrowed liberally from others’ grooves. There’s no reason not to: beats and chord progressions can’t be protected under the existing copyright laws, which recognize only the melody and lyrics.
In a track-and-hook song, the hook comes as soon as possible.
Hook writing tends to encourage a “first thought, best thought” approach to songwriting. Inspiration, not perspiration, is the order of the day. Since producers generally have a batch of tracks already prepared, like doughnuts ready for the honey glaze, topliners needn’t labor over any one track for long. If inspiration doesn’t strike quickly, move on to the next track and begin anew.
The track-and-hook method makes the producer the undisputed king of the song-making process.
In the hip-hop world, the producers are as celebrated as the artists. Dr. Dre is bigger than any of his rappers. At Death Row Records, Dre’s hip-hop hit factory in L.A., dozens of young beat makers and topliners put in long hours. The Canadian rapper Drake worked there for a while, before he was famous. “It was some of the most strenuous militant shit I’ve ever done,” he says. “But no useable songs came out of it. When I think of how he worked us, it’s no wonder he didn’t get anything out of it. It was just writers in a room churning out product all day long.”
Producers are known for their signature sounds. Timbaland (Timothy Mosley) has his funky Eastern strings; Dr. Dre his wheedling Parliament-Funkadelic-inspired gangsta beat. For Cheiron, it was the wet kick drum/dry snare combo. Those sounds are their brands, and they tell music fans who’s in charge of the record. But eventually every producer’s sound gets dated. A producer is vulnerable to changing fashions in pop music in a way the topliners are not. A great melody is timeless.
Hermansen says. “When we first got here, American pop music was linear and minimalistic, with few chord changes, and no big lift in the chorus. If you listen to radio today, there are big breakdowns, buildups, instrumental parts, and more tempo.”
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.
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.
Dr. Luke is a born hustler, and he always will be, no matter how much money and power he accumulates. He has investments in real estate, in a high-end water brand called Core Natural, and in Summit Series, a company that organizes business conferences.
Dr. Luke describes his songwriting roster as “a combination of artists, producers, topliners, beat makers, melody people, vibe people, and just lyric people.”
Vibe people, he adds, “know how to make a song happen, understand energy, and where music is going, even if they can’t play a chord or sing a note.”
Most important of all, Gottwald was comfortable with hip-hop, and that was where the pure pop mainstream of the future lay. The Swede had nothing like that in his background. “He’s got really deep roots in hip-hop,” Max Martin said. “And that’s something that’s further away from me. Having that in your arsenal makes it cool.” In 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.
Perhaps she asked Him what she should do, and the answer was: Katy, you’re going to Hollywood!
AGAIN, ONE IMAGINES, she prayed. Heavenly Father, please don’t make me go back to Santa Barbara. Make me a star. And again, it seemed as if He had her back. Perry was given that rarest of gifts in the pop business: a second chance. Columbia signed her in 2005, and she began a new solo project.
Since their success with Avril Lavigne, the Matrix had written songs for Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, and Ricky Martin. But the hits had started to dry up, and artists had stopped calling. Around the time they joined forces with Perry, the Matrix’s Lauren Christy had committed the unforgivable sin of saying publicly that Lavigne did not write her hits—the Matrix did. Artists are supposed to embody the work, and anything that undercuts that illusion is dangerous.
But Flom still felt that the album needed one or two potential hits, and suggested Perry try writing with Dr. Luke. “We kind of hung out and really vibed well,” Perry says. “And he brought in Max Martin. It was a combination pack. I really liked them together. They have great taste, and I have an intuition that has never failed me. I am very lyrics-based, and Max is very melody-based, and Luke is very track-based, so put the combination of us together and you get that ultimate pop song.”
Together with Cathy Dennis, a British dance-pop singer turned songwriter who helped with the lyrics, they wrote “I Kissed a Girl.” Max and Luke did most of the music and production in Luke’s West Twenty-First Street studio in New York City, working late at night. The title hook, according to Perry, came to her in a dream. “The chorus actually popped into my head when I woke up,” she said in a 2008 interview with the BBC. “It was one of those moments where you hear artists talking about songs they get in dreams or in the middle of the night.”
In writing lyrics, McKee adheres to Max Martin’s school of pop songwriting. Words are there to serve the melody.
“Max doesn’t really care about the lyrics because he’s Swedish,” she says, “so I have to work around that. I can write something I think is so clever and be proud of that, but if it doesn’t hit the ear right then he doesn’t like it. He’s also really stubborn about syllables. A line has to have a certain number of syllables, and they have to be mirror images of each other—it’s very mathematical.
The syllables in the first part of the chorus have to repeat in the second part. Like ‘Cal-i-forn-ia girls un-for-get-ta-ble/Dai-sy Dukes bi-kinis on top’—if you add a syllable, or take it away, it’s a completely different melody to him. I remember I wrote him a song and I was so proud of it, and he was like, ‘Why are the melodies completely different in the first and second verse?’ I was like, ‘What do you mean? It’s the same melody.’ But I had added three or four syllables. He was right, he’s always right, as much as it drives me crazy sometimes, he’s always right.”
Neither are they sure they have one until the public hears the song. Hit making remains a tricky, unpredictable endeavor.
Later Cirkut would painstakingly comp all the takes, comparing them syllable-by-syllable, and stitch them together into the best possible vocal. Comping was so mind-numbingly boring that even Dr. Luke couldn’t tolerate it. However, “Max loves comping,” Luke says. “He’ll do it for hours.”
Taken as a whole, Teenage Dream was a state-of-the-art pop album, and it showed what a hit factory is capable of when functioning at its peak.
Dr. Luke tried to explain to me the kind of music he wanted to make. “If you listen to hip hop in the ’80s and ’90s,” he says, “you can hear that at a certain point people discovered that if you’re rapping, and then someone sings a hook—that works. You know? And the reason that works is that it does a lot of the things you have to do in songwriting. One of the most important things in songwriting is melodic rhythm.”
What is melodic rhythm? I ask. “OK, say that you have a verse, and it’s done in eighth notes, and everything is starting on the one—DAH-ut da-ut da-ut da-ut DAH-ut . . . Right? OK then when you go to the pre-chorus you probably don’t want to start on the one, and you don’t want to do eighth notes. So you come in on the two, or on the upbeats, or go to long notes, so it stays fresh.”
The same principle works in reverse. In a song that’s mostly singing, a sixteen-bar rap provides new texture.
The key is to switch up the feel to keep things lively. “That’s why rapping in songs is interesting,” he goes on. “Intrinsically, if you’re rapping, and then you’re singing, you’ve created a new part. There’s no question about which part is the chorus—it’s the sung part.
When you’re doing something without rapping, you still have to make that distinction, but you do it all with melody and rhythm. And that is fundamentally what songwriting is.”
In keeping with Luke’s songwriting practice, Kesha raps the verses and sings the chorus.
EVEN BEFORE THE ONGOING Kesha drama, Dr. Luke’s peers were undecided about how far his unique combination of musical skills and ambition would carry him in the record business. Doug Morris thinks he is the Jimmy Iovine of his generation. “He is certainly one of the most talented people,” Morris says. “He’s had so many hits, and that really is the heart of what the record business is all about—the people who can deliver hit after hit after hit. Creatures like that are enormously rare. He’s already the top producer-writer, and he’ll evolve into a top executive—he can go as far as he wants to go. He’s as good as it gets.” Could he have Morris’s job one day? “Oh, absolutely. You know, these kinds of people come along very rarely, and they’re driven and brilliant and they go as far as they can and sometimes they go so far it’s shocking.”
“We’re not in the music space—we’re in the moment space,” Ek declares, with the slight air of spiritual superiority that tech visionaries sometimes give off.
Playlists can be customized according to an individual user’s “taste profile.” You just broke up with your boyfriend, you’re in a bad mood, and Justin Timberlake’s “Cry Me a River,” from the “Better Off Without You” playlist, starts. Are you playing the music, or is the music playing you?
Ek describes himself as “missionary,” by which he means he likes to formulate five-year missions for himself. “That’s how I think about life,” he says. “Five years is long enough for me to achieve something meaningful but short enough so I can change my mind every few years. I’m on my second five-year commitment on Spotify. In two years, I will have to make my next one. I will need to ask myself if I still enjoy what I’m doing. I’m kind of unusual that way, but it gives me clarity and purpose.”
Ek goes on, “It came back to me constantly that Napster was such an amazing consumer experience, and I wanted to see if it could be a viable business. We said, ‘The problem with the music industry is piracy. Great consumer product, not a great business model. But you can’t beat technology. Technology always wins. But what if you can make a better product than piracy?’ ”
Ek continues: “Piracy was kind of hard. It took a few minutes to download a song, it was kind of cumbersome, you had to worry about viruses. It’s not like people want to be pirates. They just want a great experience. So we started sketching what that would look like.”
“The thing that made Spotify very different when I first met Daniel and Martin was that they had this incredible stubbornness,” Parker goes on. “In a good way. They were willing to let the product vision lead the business deals.”
“Daniel said, ‘I think it’s going to take six weeks to get our licenses complete.’ It ended up taking two years.”
The exact terms of the licensing deals that Spotify made with the label groups are not known; all parties signed nondisclosure agreements. In addition to sharing with other rights holders nearly 70 percent of the money Spotify earns from subscriptions and ad sales—about the same revenue split that Apple provides on iTunes sales—the labels also got equity in Spotify, making them business partners; collectively, they own close to 15 percent of the company. Some analysts have questioned whether Spotify’s business model is sustainable. The company pays out so much of its revenues in fees that it barely makes a profit. It operated at a loss before 2013. (The company maintains that its focus has been on growth and expansion.) The contracts are renegotiated every two or three years, so the better Spotify does, the more, in theory, the labels could ask for. This makes Spotify unlike many Internet companies, in which the fixed costs of doing business become relatively smaller with scale. For Spotify, scale doesn’t diminish the licensing fees.
When Spotify began in the United States, in the middle of 2011, labels demanded up-front payments as the price of getting in the game. These payments were not always passed along to the content creators, even though it is their work that makes the catalogues valuable in the first place.
Ek’s answer to the question of whether Spotify is good for artists tends toward the tautological. If it’s good for listeners—and almost everyone who uses Spotify likes it—then it must be good for artists, because by encouraging more listening it will “increase the over-all pie.”
As we have seen, the artists don’t write, by and large, which makes it easier to control them in the production of hits.
The writers, for their part, already share songwriting credit with a half dozen or so other writers, because of the way song production has been industrialized since the early ’90s.
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. And since Apple makes money primarily from its hardware, it could afford to undercut Spotify on the price of a subscription—a scheme it was promoting to the labels. Of course, that would require the support of the labels, and they are Spotify’s business partners in streaming.
Apparently, I never really had a chance. 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.
But why does hearing a song over and over again make us like it? In her 2014 book On Repeat: How Music Plays the Mind, Elizabeth Margulis, who is the director of the Music Cognition Lab at the University of Arkansas, explores this topic. She explains, “When we know what’s coming next in a tune, we lean forward when listening, imagining the next bit before it actually comes. This kind of listening ahead builds a sense of participation with the music.” The songs in heavy rotation are “executing our volition after the fact.” The imagined participation encouraged by familiar music, she adds, is experienced by many people as highly pleasurable, since it mimics a kind of social communion. That’s a sobering thought. If Margulis is right, it means that the real controller of the song machine isn’t the labels, nor is it radio stations or the hit makers. At the end of the day, the true puppet master is the human brain.
Swedish hitmakers, once a crazy dream of Denniz PoP’s, supplied one quarter of all the hits on the Billboard Hot 100 in 2014.
But as malleable as the Swedish musical genius seems to be, for the Swedes themselves, adapting to American songwriting culture isn’t always easy. Savan Kotecha says, of L.A., “With producers here, it’s all about the hype in the room. Here, you gotta jump up and down and go, ‘It’s a smash! It’s a smash!’ Whereas the Swedes are like, ‘I think this could be better.’
In America you don’t want to be the negative guy in the room—that guy who, when everyone else is going ‘It’s a smash!’ is going ‘Mmm, maybe not.’ Whereas in Sweden, everyone’s negative.”
Max Martin lives in L.A. too, for a large part of the year. He is tanned and buff now—Martin White, the doughy, whey-faced front man of the band It’s Alive, has been hitting the gym. Max doesn’t have his own label, and he doesn’t have an investment in high-end bottled water, either. Perhaps because he comes from a social democratic country in which everyone is assured of a decent standard of living, and displays of excessive wealth is frowned upon, the Swede seems content to focus on his craft and not worry about making all the money. Kotecha says, “I always think in my head, if Max Martin was an American, he would have fizzled out a long time ago. He would have believed his own hype. But because he’s Swedish, he’s able to contain himself. He just focuses on being the best writer and producer and mentor he can be.”
But those were performing acts. Denniz’s vision was entirely different: a factory of Swedish writers and producers who would create hits for British and American artists.
The trick was to come up with a melody that worked with the beat, not against it.
In the United States, melody was kept at arm’s length by the DJs who were the producers of house music, because in the clubs, whenever a strong melody came over the speakers, the dancing stopped. But in Sweden, it was different. As Jan Gradvall observes, “In discos in small towns all over Sweden in the ’80s, people danced to the biggest hit song rather than the funkiest songs or best mixes. When the chorus came around, that’s when the dance floor boiled. Those kind of choruses, not unlike those of songs sung in hockey arenas or soccer stadiums, have always been loved in Sweden. So when Denniz PoP and the others DJed at these places, they realized the importance of BIG choruses.”
In a documentary that appeared on Swedish national television (STV) in 1997, Denniz told a reporter, “It’s easy to say producing this music is equal to pushing a button in the studio. But that’s like saying writing a novel is a simple push of a button on your typewriter.”
Denniz liked to say that no matter how technically adept you were at programming, sometimes you just had to “let art win.”
No matter how successful Denniz became, this critique would continue to dog him: programming music required less skill than playing it.
he knew that one of the keys to popular success in the United States was making songs that sounded good in the car.
ABBA took the flowing melodic element in Swedish folk songs and hymns (even the national anthem, “Thou Ancient, Thou Free,” sounds a bit like a pop song) and added elements of Schlager music, the Polka-based European popular music from the ’50s and ’60s, most often heard in German.
Listening to Schlager gives you some notion of what American pop music might sound like without the African influence—in a word, cheesy.
An air of melancholy pervades the superficially happy-sounding ABBA songs, another uniquely Swedish quality that would cast a long shadow over the future of pop music. Their happy songs sound sad, and their sad songs that sound happy. They appeal to listeners in a broad variety of moods.
ABBA showed that teen pop could be about adult subjects. Both “When All Is Said and Done” and “The Winner Takes It All” are about Björn and Agnetha’s and Benny and Anni-Frid’s respective divorces, and there they are in the videos, singing about their mutual pain together onstage. That’s not something you saw every day in the pop world.
In addition to ABBA’s influence, contemporary Swedish songwriters speak of growing up with the music that accompanied the popular Pippi Longstocking TV series that ran on Swedish TV in the late ’60s and early ’70s, and was later dubbed (badly) into English. In particular the theme song, “Here Comes Pippi Longstocking,” written by Jan Johansson, and also the jazz musician Georg Riedel’s contributions to the series, have a sweet-sad sort of innocence about them that would later inform many a Swedish-made Billboard hit.
Klas Åhlund, a Swedish songwriter and producer in his forties, who is also a performer (in the rock band Teddybears), says: “Swedes are very musical, and they love to write songs. But it’s a big country, and it has very few people in it. So you had these farmers out there who were good at writing songs, but had no one to sing them. Songwriting was just a thing you did on your own when you were watching the cows, a kind of meditation. You didn’t focus as much on your ability as a performer as you did on the structure and craft of the songs. Which is really not the case in the US, where your charm and your voice and your powers as a performer come immediately into play.”
As Denniz once said, in response to a question about how hard could it possibly be to write such simple songs, “it’s much more difficult to make it simple, especially achieving a simplicity without having it sound incredibly trivial.”
” As Denniz put it, “A great pop song should be interesting, in some way. That means that certain people will hate it immediately and certain people will love it, but only as long as it isn’t boring and meaningless. Then it’s not a pop song any longer; then it’s something else. It’s just music.”
Martin Dodd, who was head of A&R at Mega Records, says, “Denniz had a childlike wonder about him, and was a very social being, which reflected strongly in the music, where nothing was ever allowed to be “nice” or boring; absolutely every note, word, and beat had to have purpose or be fun.”
Lyrics that command too much attention are likely to kill the dancing.
And Dylan not withstanding, song lyrics don’t need to be poetry; they need only to tell you what you are supposed to feel when you hear the music they accompany.
In addition to working rhythmically, the sound of the words had to fit with the melody, an approach to songwriting that Denniz’s great protégé, Max Martin, would later call “melodic math.”
“I think it was to our advantage that English was not our mother language,” Ekberg says, “because we are able to treat English very respectless, and just look for the word that sounded good with the melody.” Freed from making sense, the lyricists’ horizons are boundless.
Davis comes from a time when A&R really did involve both artists and repertoire—discovering and developing artists and choosing the songs for them to sing, because in the pre-rock era it was not expected that the singers would write their own material.
However, as Pearlman wrote in his 2003 how-to-be-a-millionaire memoir, Bands, Brands, and Billions, “As I told the Jordache brothers, their name was all over the news that night.”
He quizzed Dick Scott and Maurice Starr on the New Kids’ business model. “They told me exactly how it worked, the marketing of it. Our target market was always going to be young teenage girls, because boys are into sports, and they like buying jerseys and caps and so on, for baseball or football, things of that nature, whereas the girls are totally enthralled with the band. . . . They don’t have money, but they have access to a large supply of it: their aunts, uncles, grandmas, grandpas, who would spend money on them for a concert or merchandise sooner than they would spend it on themselves.”
The word on the street about the New Kids, Artie confided to his cousin, was that not all of them could actually sing. Maurice Starr himself sang on a lot of their records, it was said.
No other city in the world is more dependent on popular culture than Orlando, and while it wasn’t hard to find kids in any town who had mainlined pop culture by growing up in front of MTV, only Orlando offered a lot of young people whose job was to bring pop culture characters to life. In addition, Orlando was blessed with a ready supply of talent scouts, vocal and dance coaches, and experienced star makers who could help a neophyte like Pearlman assemble and train a pop group.
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.
A musical act is a small entrepreneurial business. Making a hit requires a lot of different services that not all bands can provide for themselves. Calder was looking for acts that would accept his involvement and partnership. A music-industry insider told Billboard, “The idea of a rock group that is self-contained, produces itself, and does all that is not the kind of business model that he tends to join with. It’s not that he wouldn’t be able to have success with Creed or Korn or Limp Bizkit—I just don’t think it’s where his business model is. It’s more, ‘I’ll sign this artist, I’ve got this producer, they’ll record in my studio.’ ”
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.
The Swedish artist E-Type (Bo Martin Erik Eriksson) recalled, “I get this feeling of a big painter’s studio in Italy back in the 1400s or 1500s.”
In a STV documentary, The Nineties, he told producer Jens von Reis, “One assistant does the hands, another does the feet, and another does something else, and then Michelangelo walks in and says, ‘That’s really great, just turn it slightly. Now it’s good, put it in a golden frame and out with it.
In assembling his team, Denniz PoP sought out protégés with different skill sets. E-Type said, “I mean, I had been around to a bunch of different record studios and everyone said, ‘You’re nuts, what would we do with you . . . ? You’re not good-looking, you can’t sing, and you write really strange songs.’ Dagge told me the opposite: ‘How fun that you look so odd, and sound so strange, and make music that I believe could become something in the future.’
Andreas Carlsson was a gifted lyricist. Lundin had excellent technical skills. Jörgen Elofsson was adept at flowing melodies, while Rami Yacoub, a later Cheiron recruit, made sick beats. But of all the talents Denniz gathered around him, no one could match the genius for crafting melodies that fit both dance tracks and ballads possessed by the babyfaced, long-haired metalhead named Karl Martin Sandberg.
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.
Spector not only changed pop music; he also established an archetype: the driven, obsessive, autocratic producer, who will stop at nothing to get the sound he hears in his head onto a record, even if it means screwing over his collaborators.
“We’ve Got It Goin’ On” showcased for the first time the genre-busting combination of influences that converged in Max Martin. The song combines 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. On top of all that is Max’s gift for melody, which is timeless, and owes as much to Edvard Grieg’s dark Norwegian musical fable “In the Hall of the Mountain King” (aka the Inspector Gadget theme song) as to any contemporary influence.
Savan Kotecha, who co-wrote with Max Martin “DJ Got Us Fallin’ In Love,” a number-one smash, and apprenticed in the Cheiron songwriting method, thinks this quality is uniquely Swedish. “With the Swedish people, what is expected to happen is going to happen,” he says. “A Swede will not let you down, and neither do their songs. If you expect the song to blow here, it will blow here, and if you expect it to be chill there, it’s chill there.”
IT HAD TAKEN LONGER than expected for the Backstreet Boys to break through in their own country, but Lou Pearlman hadn’t been idle while waiting. He figured it was inevitable when the group finally did take off that someone else would come along and piggyback off their success by offering a product that was basically the same but just different enough to gain market share. “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.
As the principal of the “Mickey Mouse School,” Chuck Yerger, later recalled in Britney: Inside the Dream by Steve Dennis, “In all that she did, Britney gave the distinct impression that if an adult says do something, you do it. She truly felt that all adults and people in authority were good people, who had her best interests at heart.”
Dancing, it turned out, was the teenager’s passion: Jive had no idea.
Meanwhile, as Britney was blowing up around the world, the Backstreet Boys came out with their album Millennium in May 1999. The first single, a midtempo ballad called “I Want It That Way,” is arguably the prettiest of all Max Martin’s tunes.
Andreas Carlsson wrote, “One rainy day in the fall, a man dressed in a mink coat showed up with his private chauffeur and umbrella. The man was Tommy Mottola. . . . He had taken his private jet to Stockholm to talk business in hope of taking part of the Cheiron phenomena. His arrival had not been taken seriously, so when he arrived there was nobody in the studio. People had gone to dinner or the movies. This didn’t happen because we were rude, but more that we did not need the world around us, however the world around needed us.”
In his book, Carlsson recalled a remark from Def Leppard’s Phil Collen, who “explained the phenomena . . . in a very comprehensive way: ‘Everybody else started becoming better at being Def Leppard than us.’ ”
No one was having a better year than Jive in 2001. In fact, few record companies, major or independent, have ever had a year like Jive had in 2001. It owned the teen pop market, a remarkable transformation for a company that started out in the United States as a rap label.
As Zomba creative director Eric Beall puts it, “Clive was probably the most strategic person I’ve ever met in the industry. Nothing was a random, one-off decision. Everything was part of a larger plan. Sometimes at A&R meetings he would review the monthly schedule of Britney or Backstreet Boys, and on the fly would completely rework the thing in a way that he felt was more strategic and efficient. Amazing to watch how his mind worked. He truly was always three steps ahead of everyone else in the room.”
Steve Lunt says, “Actually, it was very sad. Clive didn’t want to sell the company, but he felt he had to.” There had always been a conflict between the music lover and the businessman in Calder, but people who had bet that Calder’s heart lay with the music usually lived to regret it.
In a parting e-mail to the staff, Calder, ever prescient, pointed the way toward the future of pop music and articulated the record industry’s guiding philosophy and way forward: “HIT RECORDS ARE MADE IN THE RECORDING STUDIO.”
The music business slowly changed from an art-house business run by men with ears into a corporate enterprise of quarterly earnings and timely results. But corporate culture is not conducive to musical talent.
Chris Blackwell says, “I don’t think the music business lends itself very well to being a Wall Street business. You’re always working with individuals, with creative people, and the people you are trying to reach, by and large, don’t view music as a commodity but as a relationship with a band. It takes time to expand that relationship, but most people who work for the corporations have three-year contracts, some five, and most of them are expected to produce. What an artist really needs is a champion, not a numbers guy who in another year is going to leave.”
And controversy, a pop star’s wingman, is almost never good for the corporate image.
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 directors row away from pure pop, toward the more perilous waters Zapoleon calls “the extremes,” in order to restore excitement to their stations. The extremes—alt-rock and hip-hop—attract younger listeners, always a desirable demographic for the advertisers (who, in a business sense, are a commercial station’s real constituency), but repel older ones, and so program directors begin rowing back toward the pure-pop mainstream, and the cycle starts again.
“What’s going on with this show Pop Idol, Peter?” he asked, according to Bill Carter’s 2006 book Desperate Networks. “It’s a big hit in England. I spoke to Liz and she says it’s great.” “We’re still looking at it,” Chernin replied. “Don’t look at it,” Murdoch shot back. “Buy it! Right now.”
In spite of the triumph of teen pop in the late ’90s, the word still carries with it an element of guilty pleasure in the United States. The reasons for this are complicated (my book NoBrow is an attempt to explain them at length), but suffice it to say that Americans, lacking a class system within which to situate themselves, turn to culture to find their rank in society, and pop doesn’t usually secure the status that more artistically prestigious fare offers. Only Michael Jackson could call himself the King of Pop and make the title sound like an honorific.
The show, which was supposed to be about finding talent, turned out to be about humiliating the talentless in front of a national audience. Somehow the contestants and their parents had missed that memo.
And then Clarkson went out and sang “A Moment Like This,” a new song by Cheironite Jörgen Elofsson and John Reid, written specially for the show’s finale. As the final chorus rolled around, you sensed that the song was building toward an emotional climax that people in the record business sometimes refer to as “the money note.”
The money note is the moment in Whitney Houston’s version of the Dolly Parton song “I Will Always Love You” at the beginning of the third rendition of the chorus: pause, drum beat, and then “IIIIIIEEEEEEIIIIII will always LOVE you.” It is the moment in the Celine Dion song from Titanic, “My Heart Will Go On”: the key change that begins the third verse, a note you can hear a hundred times and it still brings you up short in the supermarket and transports you from the price of milk to a world of grand romantic gesture--
Kelly hit the money note in “A Moment Like This”—the key change in the final chorus—in full cry, a chill-making moment. And when she was crowned the following night, and Justin gave her a big hug, it was pure TV magic.
And yet, Davis wrote, for all Clarkson’s subsequent worldwide success, “Was there ever any personal acknowledgment from her that I had been right?”
The copycat talent shows that appeared on other networks—The Voice, X Factor (another Simon Cowell production), and America’s Got Talent, among others—haven’t produced a superstar either. Leading one to conclude that while a TV talent show can help get an artist noticed, it can’t make a recording star. Only a record man can do that.
TEENS HAVE HISTORICALLY provided hit factories with a ready market, but they also stamp the hit makers with an expiration date. Teens don’t remain teens for long, and the next cohort is keen to differentiate themselves from their elders, particularly from their older brothers and sisters. Musical preferences work well for that: you hate the music your older sibling likes, simply because she likes it. In this way, the hit factories’ successes have a built-in backlash; even Cheiron couldn’t avoid it. The rock era greatly amplified this backlash, because it allowed the younger Beatles and Stones–loving teens not only to despise their older sibs’ Brill Building records but also to feel morally superior in preferring “real” music sung by singer-songwriters to “manufactured” music sung by hired performers.
Henceforth his stars would be made, not born, using a sophisticated system of artistic development. Lee took Lou Pearlman’s idea of putting together different personality types in a singing group and made a musical Samsung out of it, employing a method of cultural production Lee called “cultural technology.”
In a 2011 address at Stanford Business School, he explained, “I coined this term about fourteen years ago, when SM decided to launch its artists and cultural content throughout Asia. The age of information technology had dominated most of the nineties, and I predicted that the age of cultural technology would come next.” He went on, “SM Entertainment and I see culture as a type of technology. But cultural technology is much more exquisite and complex than information technology.”
“Bridging the gaps with collaborations can be the start of a global phenomenon,” Swizz told The Fader, a music magazine.
Touring, which the label was counting on the Girls to do, could also be a problem. In Korea, record promotion is built almost entirely around television appearances. In Seoul you see members of Girls’ Generation on TV every night. In the U.S., with the exception of awards shows, which are infrequent, there are few prime-time TV formats for promoting pop music; artists must rely on radio and concert tours to build a mass following.
“Jimmy always says it’s all about the connection between the artist and the fans,” he says.
In the end, as Denniz PoP used to say, sometimes you have to let art win.
In the early 2000s, the partners began to expand their business. Instead of just writing songs, they started looking for artists. “We felt like we’d built up all this knowledge over the course of our careers,” Sturken says, “both as artists and as songwriters, about what it takes to be a star, and we might as well put it to good use.” The plan was to sign an artist to a production deal, develop his or her sound, and attempt to broker them to a major label.
LIKE BRITNEY SPEARS AND Kelly Clarkson, Robyn Rihanna Fenty experienced a childhood fraught with parental discord, a violent domestic nightmare from which fame seemed to offer safe harbor.
Fenty didn’t write songs, or play an instrument; she had never had any formal training in either voice or dance before meeting Rogers. Her main qualification as a singer was that she wanted to be one so badly. Rogers sensed that ambition ran deep—“I saw it in her eyes,” he says. But what was “it,” exactly? No mere girlish desire for fame; it was more likely a much more urgent need to escape from the anxieties of a violent home life into the illusion of security and boundless love that a life onstage seemed to offer. That desire, more than any inborn talent, is what fans will connect to, and that is what record men look for in a new artist. It’s the one thing they can’t manufacture.
For Jay-Z, Brown explained, “you’ve got to be bigger than the song, otherwise the song dictates to you.”
According to Kuk Harrell, the secret of their success is that they approach songs like they are jingles. “We all learned from an early age to approach music as a business,” he explains.
You’re like an athlete—like, what pressure? You are there to perform.”
Harrell describes how the song came to be. “I was fooling around with Logic,” he says, “trying to learn it, and I had gone into the samples and found this high-hat loop, which I put on a beat. Cha chick cha bun tha smoth,” he mouths, making the percussion sounds with his breath and lips. “Then Tricky comes in and says, ‘What’s that?’ ” Stewart sat down at a keyboard and started playing chords into the box, over the looped high hat and snare sound. Then he programmed a bass line. At that point Dream came into the studio, listened to the track, and the word “umbrella” popped into his head. He went into the vocal booth and got on the mike, singing “Under my umbrella.” And then, inspired, added the all-important echoes—“ella ella ella eh eh eh”—that became the song’s signature hook.
Big Radio is still the best way—some would argue, the only way—to create hits. If the song seems to be playing everywhere at the same time, all at once, so that Zapoleon’s Rule of Three is fulfilled in a day or so, it is perceived to be a hit, and becomes one.
Radio is integral to the survival of the old hit-making mentality.
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.
Radio needs music that’s compelling enough to keep people listening through the ads, and the record companies need radio to sell records.
“Umbrella” marked the arrival of something new in pop: a digital icon. In the rock era, when the album was the standard unit of recorded music, listeners had ten or twelve songs to get to know the artist, but in the singles-oriented world of today, the artist has only three or four minutes to put their personality across, and at that Rihanna would prove to be without peer. She seems to release a new single each month, often recording the latest while she is on an eighty-city world tour promoting the previous ones. To keep her supplied with songs, her label and her manager periodically convene “writer camps”—weeklong conclaves, generally held in Los Angeles, where dozens of top producers and writers from around the world are brought in and shuffled and reshuffled in pairs over multiple-day writing sessions, in the hope of striking gold.
BY 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 employed in early hip-hop. The Swedes at Cheiron industrialized it. Today, track-and-hook has become the pillar and post of popular song. It 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.) But in mainstream pop and R&B songwriting, track-and-hook has taken over, for several reasons.
In the melody-and-lyrics approach to songwriting, a song generally begins with a melody, or with lyrics, and a rough sketch of the song is worked out by the composers before the production is done. In track-and-hook, the production comes first, and then melody and words are added. Often producers are not looking for a single melody to carry the song, but rather just enough melody to flesh out the production. That’s why producers generally speak of a song’s “melodies” rather than its melody.
As a working method, track-and-hook tends to make songs sound the same. Dance music producers have always borrowed liberally from others’ grooves. There’s no reason not to: beats and chord progressions can’t be protected under the existing copyright laws, which recognize only the melody and lyrics.
In a track-and-hook song, the hook comes as soon as possible.
Hook writing tends to encourage a “first thought, best thought” approach to songwriting. Inspiration, not perspiration, is the order of the day. Since producers generally have a batch of tracks already prepared, like doughnuts ready for the honey glaze, topliners needn’t labor over any one track for long. If inspiration doesn’t strike quickly, move on to the next track and begin anew.
The track-and-hook method makes the producer the undisputed king of the song-making process.
In the hip-hop world, the producers are as celebrated as the artists. Dr. Dre is bigger than any of his rappers. At Death Row Records, Dre’s hip-hop hit factory in L.A., dozens of young beat makers and topliners put in long hours. The Canadian rapper Drake worked there for a while, before he was famous. “It was some of the most strenuous militant shit I’ve ever done,” he says. “But no useable songs came out of it. When I think of how he worked us, it’s no wonder he didn’t get anything out of it. It was just writers in a room churning out product all day long.”
Producers are known for their signature sounds. Timbaland (Timothy Mosley) has his funky Eastern strings; Dr. Dre his wheedling Parliament-Funkadelic-inspired gangsta beat. For Cheiron, it was the wet kick drum/dry snare combo. Those sounds are their brands, and they tell music fans who’s in charge of the record. But eventually every producer’s sound gets dated. A producer is vulnerable to changing fashions in pop music in a way the topliners are not. A great melody is timeless.
Hermansen says. “When we first got here, American pop music was linear and minimalistic, with few chord changes, and no big lift in the chorus. If you listen to radio today, there are big breakdowns, buildups, instrumental parts, and more tempo.”
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.
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.
Dr. Luke is a born hustler, and he always will be, no matter how much money and power he accumulates. He has investments in real estate, in a high-end water brand called Core Natural, and in Summit Series, a company that organizes business conferences.
Dr. Luke describes his songwriting roster as “a combination of artists, producers, topliners, beat makers, melody people, vibe people, and just lyric people.”
Vibe people, he adds, “know how to make a song happen, understand energy, and where music is going, even if they can’t play a chord or sing a note.”
Most important of all, Gottwald was comfortable with hip-hop, and that was where the pure pop mainstream of the future lay. The Swede had nothing like that in his background. “He’s got really deep roots in hip-hop,” Max Martin said. “And that’s something that’s further away from me. Having that in your arsenal makes it cool.” In 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.
Perhaps she asked Him what she should do, and the answer was: Katy, you’re going to Hollywood!
AGAIN, ONE IMAGINES, she prayed. Heavenly Father, please don’t make me go back to Santa Barbara. Make me a star. And again, it seemed as if He had her back. Perry was given that rarest of gifts in the pop business: a second chance. Columbia signed her in 2005, and she began a new solo project.
Since their success with Avril Lavigne, the Matrix had written songs for Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, and Ricky Martin. But the hits had started to dry up, and artists had stopped calling. Around the time they joined forces with Perry, the Matrix’s Lauren Christy had committed the unforgivable sin of saying publicly that Lavigne did not write her hits—the Matrix did. Artists are supposed to embody the work, and anything that undercuts that illusion is dangerous.
But Flom still felt that the album needed one or two potential hits, and suggested Perry try writing with Dr. Luke. “We kind of hung out and really vibed well,” Perry says. “And he brought in Max Martin. It was a combination pack. I really liked them together. They have great taste, and I have an intuition that has never failed me. I am very lyrics-based, and Max is very melody-based, and Luke is very track-based, so put the combination of us together and you get that ultimate pop song.”
Together with Cathy Dennis, a British dance-pop singer turned songwriter who helped with the lyrics, they wrote “I Kissed a Girl.” Max and Luke did most of the music and production in Luke’s West Twenty-First Street studio in New York City, working late at night. The title hook, according to Perry, came to her in a dream. “The chorus actually popped into my head when I woke up,” she said in a 2008 interview with the BBC. “It was one of those moments where you hear artists talking about songs they get in dreams or in the middle of the night.”
In writing lyrics, McKee adheres to Max Martin’s school of pop songwriting. Words are there to serve the melody.
“Max doesn’t really care about the lyrics because he’s Swedish,” she says, “so I have to work around that. I can write something I think is so clever and be proud of that, but if it doesn’t hit the ear right then he doesn’t like it. He’s also really stubborn about syllables. A line has to have a certain number of syllables, and they have to be mirror images of each other—it’s very mathematical.
The syllables in the first part of the chorus have to repeat in the second part. Like ‘Cal-i-forn-ia girls un-for-get-ta-ble/Dai-sy Dukes bi-kinis on top’—if you add a syllable, or take it away, it’s a completely different melody to him. I remember I wrote him a song and I was so proud of it, and he was like, ‘Why are the melodies completely different in the first and second verse?’ I was like, ‘What do you mean? It’s the same melody.’ But I had added three or four syllables. He was right, he’s always right, as much as it drives me crazy sometimes, he’s always right.”
Neither are they sure they have one until the public hears the song. Hit making remains a tricky, unpredictable endeavor.
Later Cirkut would painstakingly comp all the takes, comparing them syllable-by-syllable, and stitch them together into the best possible vocal. Comping was so mind-numbingly boring that even Dr. Luke couldn’t tolerate it. However, “Max loves comping,” Luke says. “He’ll do it for hours.”
Taken as a whole, Teenage Dream was a state-of-the-art pop album, and it showed what a hit factory is capable of when functioning at its peak.
Dr. Luke tried to explain to me the kind of music he wanted to make. “If you listen to hip hop in the ’80s and ’90s,” he says, “you can hear that at a certain point people discovered that if you’re rapping, and then someone sings a hook—that works. You know? And the reason that works is that it does a lot of the things you have to do in songwriting. One of the most important things in songwriting is melodic rhythm.”
What is melodic rhythm? I ask. “OK, say that you have a verse, and it’s done in eighth notes, and everything is starting on the one—DAH-ut da-ut da-ut da-ut DAH-ut . . . Right? OK then when you go to the pre-chorus you probably don’t want to start on the one, and you don’t want to do eighth notes. So you come in on the two, or on the upbeats, or go to long notes, so it stays fresh.”
The same principle works in reverse. In a song that’s mostly singing, a sixteen-bar rap provides new texture.
The key is to switch up the feel to keep things lively. “That’s why rapping in songs is interesting,” he goes on. “Intrinsically, if you’re rapping, and then you’re singing, you’ve created a new part. There’s no question about which part is the chorus—it’s the sung part.
When you’re doing something without rapping, you still have to make that distinction, but you do it all with melody and rhythm. And that is fundamentally what songwriting is.”
In keeping with Luke’s songwriting practice, Kesha raps the verses and sings the chorus.
EVEN BEFORE THE ONGOING Kesha drama, Dr. Luke’s peers were undecided about how far his unique combination of musical skills and ambition would carry him in the record business. Doug Morris thinks he is the Jimmy Iovine of his generation. “He is certainly one of the most talented people,” Morris says. “He’s had so many hits, and that really is the heart of what the record business is all about—the people who can deliver hit after hit after hit. Creatures like that are enormously rare. He’s already the top producer-writer, and he’ll evolve into a top executive—he can go as far as he wants to go. He’s as good as it gets.” Could he have Morris’s job one day? “Oh, absolutely. You know, these kinds of people come along very rarely, and they’re driven and brilliant and they go as far as they can and sometimes they go so far it’s shocking.”
“We’re not in the music space—we’re in the moment space,” Ek declares, with the slight air of spiritual superiority that tech visionaries sometimes give off.
Playlists can be customized according to an individual user’s “taste profile.” You just broke up with your boyfriend, you’re in a bad mood, and Justin Timberlake’s “Cry Me a River,” from the “Better Off Without You” playlist, starts. Are you playing the music, or is the music playing you?
Ek describes himself as “missionary,” by which he means he likes to formulate five-year missions for himself. “That’s how I think about life,” he says. “Five years is long enough for me to achieve something meaningful but short enough so I can change my mind every few years. I’m on my second five-year commitment on Spotify. In two years, I will have to make my next one. I will need to ask myself if I still enjoy what I’m doing. I’m kind of unusual that way, but it gives me clarity and purpose.”
Ek goes on, “It came back to me constantly that Napster was such an amazing consumer experience, and I wanted to see if it could be a viable business. We said, ‘The problem with the music industry is piracy. Great consumer product, not a great business model. But you can’t beat technology. Technology always wins. But what if you can make a better product than piracy?’ ”
Ek continues: “Piracy was kind of hard. It took a few minutes to download a song, it was kind of cumbersome, you had to worry about viruses. It’s not like people want to be pirates. They just want a great experience. So we started sketching what that would look like.”
“The thing that made Spotify very different when I first met Daniel and Martin was that they had this incredible stubbornness,” Parker goes on. “In a good way. They were willing to let the product vision lead the business deals.”
“Daniel said, ‘I think it’s going to take six weeks to get our licenses complete.’ It ended up taking two years.”
The exact terms of the licensing deals that Spotify made with the label groups are not known; all parties signed nondisclosure agreements. In addition to sharing with other rights holders nearly 70 percent of the money Spotify earns from subscriptions and ad sales—about the same revenue split that Apple provides on iTunes sales—the labels also got equity in Spotify, making them business partners; collectively, they own close to 15 percent of the company. Some analysts have questioned whether Spotify’s business model is sustainable. The company pays out so much of its revenues in fees that it barely makes a profit. It operated at a loss before 2013. (The company maintains that its focus has been on growth and expansion.) The contracts are renegotiated every two or three years, so the better Spotify does, the more, in theory, the labels could ask for. This makes Spotify unlike many Internet companies, in which the fixed costs of doing business become relatively smaller with scale. For Spotify, scale doesn’t diminish the licensing fees.
When Spotify began in the United States, in the middle of 2011, labels demanded up-front payments as the price of getting in the game. These payments were not always passed along to the content creators, even though it is their work that makes the catalogues valuable in the first place.
Ek’s answer to the question of whether Spotify is good for artists tends toward the tautological. If it’s good for listeners—and almost everyone who uses Spotify likes it—then it must be good for artists, because by encouraging more listening it will “increase the over-all pie.”
As we have seen, the artists don’t write, by and large, which makes it easier to control them in the production of hits.
The writers, for their part, already share songwriting credit with a half dozen or so other writers, because of the way song production has been industrialized since the early ’90s.
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. And since Apple makes money primarily from its hardware, it could afford to undercut Spotify on the price of a subscription—a scheme it was promoting to the labels. Of course, that would require the support of the labels, and they are Spotify’s business partners in streaming.
Apparently, I never really had a chance. 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.
But why does hearing a song over and over again make us like it? In her 2014 book On Repeat: How Music Plays the Mind, Elizabeth Margulis, who is the director of the Music Cognition Lab at the University of Arkansas, explores this topic. She explains, “When we know what’s coming next in a tune, we lean forward when listening, imagining the next bit before it actually comes. This kind of listening ahead builds a sense of participation with the music.” The songs in heavy rotation are “executing our volition after the fact.” The imagined participation encouraged by familiar music, she adds, is experienced by many people as highly pleasurable, since it mimics a kind of social communion. That’s a sobering thought. If Margulis is right, it means that the real controller of the song machine isn’t the labels, nor is it radio stations or the hit makers. At the end of the day, the true puppet master is the human brain.
Swedish hitmakers, once a crazy dream of Denniz PoP’s, supplied one quarter of all the hits on the Billboard Hot 100 in 2014.
But as malleable as the Swedish musical genius seems to be, for the Swedes themselves, adapting to American songwriting culture isn’t always easy. Savan Kotecha says, of L.A., “With producers here, it’s all about the hype in the room. Here, you gotta jump up and down and go, ‘It’s a smash! It’s a smash!’ Whereas the Swedes are like, ‘I think this could be better.’
In America you don’t want to be the negative guy in the room—that guy who, when everyone else is going ‘It’s a smash!’ is going ‘Mmm, maybe not.’ Whereas in Sweden, everyone’s negative.”
Max Martin lives in L.A. too, for a large part of the year. He is tanned and buff now—Martin White, the doughy, whey-faced front man of the band It’s Alive, has been hitting the gym. Max doesn’t have his own label, and he doesn’t have an investment in high-end bottled water, either. Perhaps because he comes from a social democratic country in which everyone is assured of a decent standard of living, and displays of excessive wealth is frowned upon, the Swede seems content to focus on his craft and not worry about making all the money. Kotecha says, “I always think in my head, if Max Martin was an American, he would have fizzled out a long time ago. He would have believed his own hype. But because he’s Swedish, he’s able to contain himself. He just focuses on being the best writer and producer and mentor he can be.”