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Summary
Summary
Over the last two decades a new type of hit song has emerged, one that is almost inescapably catchy. Pop songs have always had a "hook," but today's songs bristle with them: a hook every seven seconds is the rule. Painstakingly crafted to tweak the brain's delight in melody, rhythm, and repetition, these songs are highly processed products. Like snack-food engineers, modern songwriters have discovered the musical "bliss point." And just like junk food, the bliss point leaves you wanting more.
In The Song Machine, longtime New Yorker staff writer John Seabrook tells the story of the massive cultural upheaval that produced these new, super-strength hits. Seabrook takes us into a strange and surprising world, full of unexpected and vivid characters, as he traces the growth of this new approach to hit-making from its obscure origins in early 1990s Sweden to its dominance of today's Billboard charts.
Journeying from New York to Los Angeles, Stockholm to Korea, Seabrook visits specialized teams composing songs in digital labs with new "track-and-hook" techniques. The stories of artists like Katy Perry, Britney Spears, and Rihanna, as well as expert songsmiths like Max Martin, Stargate, Ester Dean, and Dr. Luke, The Song Machine shows what life is like in an industry that has been catastrophically disrupted--spurring innovation, competition, intense greed, and seductive new products.
Going beyond music to discuss money, business, marketing, and technology, The Song Machine explores what the new hits may be doing to our brains and listening habits, especially as services like Spotify and Apple Music use streaming data to gather music into new genres invented by algorithms based on listener behavior.
Fascinating, revelatory, and original, The Song Machine will change the way you listen to music.
Author Notes
John Seabrook has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1993. The author of several books including Nobrow, he has taught narrative nonfiction writing at Princeton University. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Traveling from Sweden and South Korea to Los Angeles and New York for interviews with a wide array of songwriters, producers, and artists, New Yorker writer Seabrook tunefully delivers a soulful refrain on the multilayered process of building hit songs today. He profiles Soo-Man Lee, founder of SM Entertainment and architect of K-pop, who created a manual detailing steps necessary to establish a winning artist: which chord progressions to use in songs, which camera angles for videos, and when to import foreign producers or choreographers. Denniz Pop's vision of making the hits involves using a factory of Swedish songwriters who would create hits for British and American acts, combining the beat-driven music people danced to in clubs with the pop music people listened to on the radio. Seabrook also profiles Lou Pearlman, who engineered the Backstreet Boys and mismanaged their careers, and Britney Spears and Rhianna, examining the formulas for their pop successes. Seabrook almost giddily explores the ways that hit songs hook the listener when the "rhythm, sound, melody, and harmony converge to create a single ecstatic moment, felt more in the body than in the head." (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Like many who drive with someone much younger in control of the audio, writer Seabrook found himself suddenly captive, and suddenly blown away, by the new top 40. Or top 10,000. He has heard a lot much of his choice, but much a revelation, to his delight and interest; hence, this rollicking and surprising investigation into what makes a hit a hit. It's not always the product of a few musicians exploring their feelings late at night, as one might have thought; instead, it's a highly sophisticated, manipulative, and money-motivated machine that not only envelopes you but, face it, often makes you feel good. Seabrook's focus here is on the mechanics of the hit makers (starting in Tin Pan Alley and carrying onward to such biggies as Berry Gordy, Phil Spector, etc.) who focused on production, distribution, and money making, with the artists often coming last (if not being invented; e.g., the Backstreet Boys). The record-album (and CD, in part) business may have teetered and fallen, but the hits keep coming, thanks to electronics, sampling, business savvy, and those who understand what the public craves and provide it. Eye-opening and astonishing.--Kinney, Eloise Copyright 2015 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
IN MY 20s I WROTE about music for Rolling Stone magazine, which put me in contact with all sorts of record business people - artists, hustlers, machers, you know the cast. Many of them were aggressive and arrogant and flaunting their success at Mr. Chow or in St. Barts. It was the '90s, and as an industry the music biz was doing better than it ever had. In 1999 worldwide revenue was $27 billion, and it looked like nothing but blue sky ahead. John Seabrook's well-researched new book about the industry covers the sharp downward slope that followed. The people I knew combed the country looking for the next hit makers and chatted with global conglomerates about acquisitions and weekended in the Hamptons, with no idea that the end of the party was right around the corner. That their industry was going to contract so much that in 2014 worldwide revenue would be $15 billion, not much more than half of what it had been at its peak. There's still a music business, but it's a lot less profitable and a lot less arrogant than it used to be. Much of the fault has been laid at the door of Napster and the digital Pandora's box it opened. It's true that piracy did significant damage to the music business model - if suddenly people can get your product free, it's going to be hard to sell it. Steve Jobs helped the industry put the genie back in the bottle a little, but iTunes' success with selling songs has been a Pyrrhic victory: An industry that was used to selling albums for around $15 was now peddling songs for 99 cents - which, according to Seabrook, caused a 46 percent drop in revenue. But there have been other unfortunate changes that also hurt the business. The music biz used to be a herd of labels, each with its own character, some of them run by people who were said to "have ears." These were people who could hear a hit, or even better, who could hear a consistent hit maker, before anyone else. They were the high priests of this world, people like Clive Davis, Tommy Mottola and Ahmet Ertegun. They understood how to manage creative people, and if artists needed more time or money before finishing their albums, they got it. But the industry's success led to labels being snapped up by global conglomerates, which has led to music companies sometimes being run by people who are, let's say, less sensitive to the needs of creative people and more focused on quarterly reports. Also, as record sales dropped and less money could be made from recording, artists began touring more relentlessly. But albums are still helpful for increasing ticket sales, so albums must still be recorded. That means lyrics are sometimes written on a tour bus as it moves from city to city, and vocals are recorded in makeshift studios in hotel rooms. This seems like a harder path to making meaningful music than settling into a beautiful studio in Los Angeles or Memphis or Kingston and staying until the spirits deliver a heavenly gift. And all of that is why over the last decade we have watched the music business slowly atrophy. It's withering away before our eyes. Not only are the people inside it no longer so arrogant; in some cases they're pretty anxious. They're watching the last gasps of a dying model. Or, as Thom Yorke called Spotify, "the last desperate fart of a dying corpse." In "The Song Machine," Seabrook - a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of "Nobrow: The Culture of Marketing, the Marketing of Culture" - takes us inside the troubled modern music business. We go behind the curtain to meet some of the producers, executives, songwriters and artists responsible for the hits that our kids listen to on Spotify, songs that, to Seabrook, seem like "industrial-strength products, made for malls, stadiums, airports, casinos, gyms and the Super Bowl halftime show. The music reminded me a little of the bubble-gum pop of my preteen years, but it was vodka-flavored and laced with MDMA." (MDMA is a sweet flavor compared with the drug that inspired a recent No. 1 song on the Billboard chart: "Can't Feel My Face" by the Weeknd - say "Weekend," Mom - which is about the artist's relationship with cocaine. But I digress.) These songs/products are quite often a sort of three-minute advertisement for how powerful or sexual or beautiful or awesome the artist is. "The artists occupy a central place in the songs," Seabrook writes, "but more as vocal personalities than singers. ... What do they stand for as artists? Their insights into the human condition seem to extend no further than the walls of the vocal booth." It does seem as if the political spine that was provided by the likes of Bob Dylan and Public Enemy and Radiohead has grown soft. But no matter - what the music biz cares about most is making hits. One of my exec friends once told me, "One hit pays for 10 flops." O.K., but what happens when the hits become rare and the ones you find don't become as big? The struggle to sell truckloads has only increased the frantic search for monster hits. Seabrook takes us through the world of people who are trying to make those hits. He hangs out at a writer camp where an array of songwriters lay up in a hotel for a few days, banging out multiple songs a day, trying to create a hit for Rihanna. He introduces us to top-liners - people who write catchy, hummable lyrics and sing the demo that lets a star know what to sing and how to sing it. He shows us the tension between artists and executives, as when Kelly Clarkson records a song but later tells Clive Davis, then the chairman and chief executive of RCA Music Group, that she hates it. Davis basically says too bad and regales her with stories like the one about Barry Manilow, who hated "I Write the Songs" and initially refused to record it. It went to No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 and won a Grammy for song of the year. Hearing this, Clarkson digs in her heels. She cries, according to Davis's account in his memoir. The record man doesn't budge. The song they are arguing over is "Since U Been Gone," which reached No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 and sold over a million copies. Don't argue with Davis's ears. Seabrook also takes us to a Swedish producer's hit-making factory. I hadn't fully grasped the large impact that Swedish producers have had on modern pop music and the reasons there are so many great producers and songwriters in that nation. "Swedes are very musical, and they love to write songs," says Klas Ahlund, a Swedish songwriter and producer. "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 U.S., where your charm and your voice and your powers as a performer come immediately into play." For most of the book, Seabrook describes a machine that appears to be working fine. We're just out here trying to make hits. What dying model? There are no problems to see here! Move along! And don't forget to dance while you do! But toward the end we meet Daniel Ek, the founder of Spotify, and then we start to see the unraveling. Spotify has picked up where iTunes left off, furthering the erosion of revenue - why buy one album for $15 when you can rent the entire library for $9.99? And artists' income from streaming is a small fraction of what it was from sales. This is partly because there's less money in streaming, but there's also this: "Month by month, Spotify pays the major labels lump sums for the entire market share of their catalogs. How the labels decide to parcel these payments out to their artists isn't transparent, because, while Spotify gives detailed data to the labels, the labels ultimately decide how to share that information with their artists." Seabrook quotes an unnamed industry leader: "It's like you go to your bank, and the bank says, 'Here's your salary,' and you say, 'But what is my employer paying me? I work for them, not you!' And the bank says, 'We are not going to tell you, but this is what we think you should get paid.'" Clearly this system is privileging the stars, whom labels need most, over the lesser lights. Seabrook speaks to Rosanne Cash, who said she made $104 from 600,000 streams. A lot of artists are getting less of a cut of a shrinking pie. But what's happening to songwriters is much scarier, and it has the potential to truly kill the industry. In order to get into business in America, Spotify struck a deal with the labels that does not give much to songwriters: The owner of the recording, the label, gets most of the money, while the owner of the publishing rights, the songwriter, gets a teeny piece. "If streaming is the future," the songwriter Savan Kotecha says, "no young songwriter will be able to make a living." This whole house of cards called the music biz is built on songwriters coming up with hits that a superstar can sing. What happens without them? "If songwriters can't afford to work," Seabrook writes, "then the whole hit-making apparatus of the song machine is doomed." Hit songs are now 'industrial-strength products, made for malls, stadiums, airports.' TOURÉ is the author of several books, including "I Would Die 4 U: Why Prince Became an Icon."
Kirkus Review
New Yorker staff writer Seabrook (Flash of Genius: And Other True Stories of Invention, 2008, etc.) examines the seismic shifts in the music industry. There are plenty of good books that have shown how "hits are the source of hard dealings and dark deeds." If it's no surprise that the music industry can be a dirty business, the author shows just how radically the business has changed, with power shifting from the American-British axis to Sweden (and Korea and China on the horizon), with album-oriented rock eclipsed by contemporary hit pop and with streaming undermining not only the sales of CDs and downloads, but the future of the music business as we know it. Even those well-versed in the trade might be surprised to learn that a South African native named Clive Calder, through his Jive label, "is and for the foreseeable future will be the single richest man the music business ever produced." Those riches accrued from his involvement with the Backstreet Boys, 'N Sync, and Britney Spears but even more from his visionary focus on producers rather than performers and publishing rights rather than record sales. His story intersects with that of the notorious Lou Pearlman, now imprisoned for "a giant Ponzi scheme" but formerly involved in manufacturing those acts and more. But some of the freshest and most fascinating material concerns the way that Swedish musical masterminds whose names are little-known to American music consumers have been able to dominate over decades and genres by bridging pop hooks and dance-floor beats. Max Martin, for one, has enjoyed a string of Billboard chart-toppers extending from Spears' breakthrough and Bon Jovi's comeback through recent work with Taylor Swift. Seabrook goes deeper into the career developments of Rihanna and Katy Perry, but most of the artists hold insignificant power within the international behemoth that this industry has become and even less control over their own musical progression. A revelatory ear-opener, as the music business remains in a state of significant flux. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Seabrook (Flash of Genius) takes music fans behind the scenes of the pop-music industry as he reveals the machinations of making modern youth-oriented pop and R & B hit songs. He also shares the stories of a series of successful executives, producers, songwriters, and artists who have been responsible for some of the most recognizable and best-selling singles of the past few decades. Seabrook's enlightening exploration of the creative and commercial aspects of the music business also includes thoughtful personal commentary on and in-depth research into technological advances and changing business models, but the book is centered on industry leaders who create and market songs that are considered mostly as consumable product rather than artistic contributions to popular culture. The book features a well-crafted balance of detail and narrative drive that is easy to follow and contains a wealth of fascinating insight. Dion Graham provides clear and enthusiastic narration. VERDICT This fun and informative book is a solid choice for popular music fans interested in what goes into making and marketing hit records within changing business and technology landscapes. ["This clever, lively, and well-researched book is essential for pop fans": LJ 9/15/15 starred review of the Norton hc; one of LJ's Top Ten Best Books of 2015: ow.ly/UCvAc.-Ed.]-Douglas King, Univ. of South Carolina Lib., Columbia © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
| Hook: The Bliss Point | |
| 1 You Spin Me Round | p. 3 |
| 2 A Continuity of Hits | p. 12 |
| First Verse: Cheiron: Mr. Pop and the Metalhead | |
| 3 Inside the Box | p. 21 |
| 4 "The Sign" | p. 34 |
| 5 Big Poppa | p. 47 |
| 6 Martin Sandberg's Terrible Secret | p. 58 |
| 7 Britney Spears: Hit Me Baby | p. 81 |
| 8 "I Want It That Way" | p. 92 |
| Chorus: The Money Note: The Ballad of Kelly and Clive | |
| 9 My Ancestral Hit Parade | p. 111 |
| 10 The Dragon's Teeth | p. 114 |
| 11 The Doldrums | p. 120 |
| 12 American Idol | p. 124 |
| 13 "Since U Been Gone" | p. 133 |
| Second Verse: Factory Girls: Cultural Technology and the Making of K-Pop | |
| 14 "Gee" | p. 149 |
| Chorus: Rihanna: Track-and-Hook | |
| 15 "Umbrella" | p. 171 |
| 16 "Ester Dean: On the Hook" | p. 196 |
| 17 Stargate: Those Lank)' Norwegian Dudes | p. 208 |
| 18 "Rude Boy" | p. 221 |
| Bridge: Or, LuKe: Teenage Dream | |
| 19 Speed Chess | p. 235 |
| 20 Katy Perry: Altai Call | p. 249 |
| 21 Melodic Math | p. 260 |
| 22 Kesha: Teenage Nightmare | p. 269 |
| Chorus: Spotify | |
| 23 The Moment Space | p. 285 |
| Outro: Songworm | |
| 24 "Roar" | p. 303 |
| A Note on Sources | p. 309 |
| Acknowledgments | p. 311 |
| Index | p. 315 |
