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Why do modern pop songs have so many credited writers?

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Re: Why do modern pop songs have so many credited writers?

#11

Post by plastic3169 »

Buildstarted wrote: post #7
bsder wrote: post #3

It's a simple answer: remuneration. Songwriters get paid mechanical royalties, performance royalties, and synch fees anytime the song is used. Bands, for example, only get paid when their specific recording gets played. Therefore, if something gets remixed, covered, etc. you want to be the songwriter , not the band .

Reminds me of a story about Gene Roddenberry. (of Star Trek fame) Apparently he wrote lyrics to the original series theme song so that he'd get half the royalties every time it was played even though the lyrics weren't used. (Inside Star Trek: The Real Story, 1997, pp 178, 185)

Also Danny Elfman has joked that it turned out financially very important that he sang the words The Simpsons in the theme song.

Re: Why do modern pop songs have so many credited writers?

#12

Post by solarmist »

bombolo wrote: post #10
echelon wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe this is how AI will work. Every contributor to the data set gets micropennies per inference century (a reasonable measure). Of course future industrial foundational models will be bought and paid for (and royalty free) for the companies that assemble them.

The entire point of AI currently is to NOT remunerate.

Sure, but once it becomes commercially useful in creative works that will likely change.

Re: Why do modern pop songs have so many credited writers?

#14

Post by leovander »

plastic3169 wrote: post #11
Buildstarted wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminds me of a story about Gene Roddenberry. (of Star Trek fame) Apparently he wrote lyrics to the original series theme song so that he'd get half the royalties every time it was played even though the lyrics weren't used. (Inside Star Trek: The Real Story, 1997, pp 178, 185)

Also Danny Elfman has joked that it turned out financially very important that he sang the words The Simpsons in the theme song.

Bryan Cranston on Malcolm in the Middle[0].

[0] https://youtu.be/yuGjVKOQc98?t=22

Re: Why do modern pop songs have so many credited writers?

#16

Post by bazoom42 »

droptablemain wrote: post #15

Modern pop music is a more refined commercial industry than it was in the past. It's been sliding further and further away from art and toward the commercial. It is what it is.

When was pop music not commercial? Isn’t this basically the definition of pop music?

Re: Why do modern pop songs have so many credited writers?

#17

Post by bodhiandphysics »

So there’s an interesting prehistory to all this. The us music industry began in the late 19th century… and this is before the record! music publishing and songwriting was literally publishing… of the sheet music. The standard form of this was as a piano score, and that’s the form that songwriters generally had copywrite on. Now if you were to perform this you would obviously need an orchestration, and this was subject to copywrite as well, but orchestrations were generally not published. An important thing to consider is that orchestration is a technical skill, and many great songwriters had limited formal training in music. So orchestration was almost always separate from songwriting. It still is on broadway; almost all great broadway composers outsourced orchestration (including composers like Richard Rogers, Gershwin, or Sondheim who were perfectly capable of writing it).

Re: Why do modern pop songs have so many credited writers?

#20

Post by at-fates-hands »

droptablemain wrote: post #15

Modern pop music is a more refined commercial industry than it was in the past. It's been sliding further and further away from art and toward the commercial. It is what it is.

One can make this argument based on the fact Tom McDonald's "Ghost" went to number 1 and he was the sole writer, producer and musician on the song.

Love him or hate him, he's still an anomaly as a 100% top to bottom independent artist. He often makes light of this in many of his video shorts.

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