The Song Machine:  Inside The Hit Factory, by John Seabrook

Reading this book did something strange, and that was make me feel sympathetic for most of the people involved in the song machine that goes on in contemporary pop music.  To be sure, it has been obvious for a long time that artists were having a hard time getting their just desserts when it comes to royalties, but the new streaming approach to music has made it more difficult for writers to make a living, especially since song & lyrics songwriting has been replaced by beat & melody writing where producers take more and more of the writers’ share on the topline.  This book is clearly written from an insider perspective, and it casts some dark shadows upon the viability of the pop music business and its model at present, and also shows some of the ways that different people have greatly simplified music to the point where hooks are far more common and songs far more similar than was the case in the past, although the book also indicates that a great deal of the pop music business is cyclical in nature and subject to trends that first discourage and then encourage pop songcraft.

This book of a bit more than 300 pages is divided into 24 chapters that deal with different aspects of the contemporary music business, including historical as well as what was “current events” at the time the book was published.  The book begins with a discussion of the bliss point as well as chapters on “Right Round” (1) and Clive Davis’ view on a continuity of hits (2) that artists have which requires popular songs over a long period of time.  After that there are eight chapters that deal with the history of the contemporary song machine by looking at the rise of Cheiron studios in the early 1990’s, first as a collaboration between various Swedish songwriters and producers (3), then managing the success of Ace of Base (4), then looking at the birth of the Backstreet Boys (5), as well as its competition (6), and then the rise of Britney Spears (7) as well as the continued success of the Backstreet Boys on their second album (8).  The third section of the book provides a series of chapters that look at American Idol and that side of the song factory with chapters about the author’s ancestral hit parade (9), periods of decline in pop music (10, 11), the rise of American Idol (12), Kelly’s attempts at gaining more independence (13), and then even a chapter involving K-pop (14) and its cultural influence.  Four chapters look at Rihanna, from her start (15), to her work with Ester Dean (16), to the efforts of Stargate (17), to her success with “Rude Boy” (18).  Four chapters look at Dr. Luke and his career, from his own biography (19), to his work with Katy Perry (20), to his approach to making music (21), and his problems with Kesha (22).  After that the book finishes with chapters on Spotify (23) and Katy Perry’s “Roar” (24), after which tehre is a note on sources, acknowledgements, and an index.

Over the course of this book the author is keen to note not only the artists who depended on Swedish (and other) hitmakers for their pop success, but also the machine itself, with the producers as well as the songwriters involved in the process and the efforts that it takes to break someone into the mainstream.  As a whole, this book presents the reader with a picture of the dark satanic mills of the contemporary music business, where songwriters all desire to become famous singers, and where a huge amount of the revenue belongs to a few particularly successful songs rather than the larger body of music as a whole that is released.  Given the desire of producers to become label bosses and songwriters to become performers and performers to get the credit of being songwriters as well as singers, the pop music business appears to be the sort of business where everyone is trying to be someone else and to make a living exploiting someone else or the talents of someone else, without a great deal of fellow feeling or the ability to work together in harmonious unity.  All of this makes a book like this very revealing, but also very melancholy at the same time.