Name: The song machine
ISBN: 9780393241921

The song machine

There's a reason hit songs offer such guilty pleasure--they're designed that way. 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. The song machine explores what the new hits may be doing to our brains and listening habits, especially as music services use streaming data to gather music into new genres invented by algorithms based on listener behavior. Revelatory and original, this book will change the way you listen to music.

What Hacker News says

autoexecMay 2024

That's because in the 60s and 70s artists were much more likely to write their own music and develop their own sound. Today artists are mostly just performers who record labels hired because they were pretty and can be autotuned to sound okay and their songs are the product of committees that buy and then assemble a few hooks written by hitmakers and Swedish people before handing those hooks off to producers to finish, while the performer might get provide some token input or come up with a few lyrics as long as they work around the mentions of whatever products corporations paid the record label to include in the song (https://www.wired.com/2008/09/products-placed/). That's obviously not always the case, but it's often not too far off. I'd recommend reading "The Song Machine: Inside the Hit Factory" for some ugly details

It doesn't mean that that kind of music isn't any good, but it's often entirely commercial from the very start which makes it hard for artists who had little if anything to do with the creation of those songs to care about "selling out".

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gnatMay 2022

"The Song Machine: Inside the Hit Factory" by John Seabrook covers the Max Martin phenenomenon and more. I greatly enjoyed it, and if you enjoyed Rick talking about Max Martin then I reckon you'll like it too.

(I'm also +1 on 12Tone. I haven't found a dud from him yet, unlike Rick Beato who sometimes is superficial as in the original link)

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historynopsNov 2021

A great book about the prodigiousness of Max Martin and other Swedish producers: "The Song Machine: Inside the Hit Factory". Lots of industry tales about artist who did and didn't take the advice of their producers. Kelly Clarkson, for example, stopped taking Max Martin's advice after her breakout album and slowly declined with fewer recognizable hits.

The theme: Hits can't be planned or predicted. It's a numbers game where you keep trying to make a large number of them and eventually something breaks through.

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peapickerMar 2021

This is an excerpt from Seabrook's book, which is pretty good, I've read it.

https://www.amazon.com/Song-Machine-Inside-Hit-Factory/dp/03...

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hardtkeJul 2020

I highly recommend The Song Machine (Inside the Hit Factory) by John Seabrook. The author describes the modern reincarnation of the Brill Building that pumps out pop hits using methods that we would not call songwriting (Max Martin, Dr. Luke, etc.). The goal is to get you to listen to 30 seconds of a song (that counts as a spin on digital streaming services). They've decomposed the process into mass production of backing tracks (using pro tools) which then get handed to so-called topliners that add the "hook" (the catchy part of the song). They stick the famous artist at the beginning of the song to get you past the 30 second threshold.

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ericjangMay 2017

For those interested in this topic, I highly recommend "The Song Machine", by John Seabrook. Music is no longer written by single songwriter-singer, it's manufactured on an assembly line to optimize for 'hits'. Hits are to record labels as unicorns are to VCs :)

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/18/books/review/the-song-mac...

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