The Song Machine: How to Make a Hit by John Seabrook
| The Song Machine: How to Make a Hit by John Seabrook | |
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| Category: Entertainment | |
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Reviewer: John Van der Kiste
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| Summary: Since the birth of the recorded music industry, companies have competed with each other in the marketplace, the songwriter being a vital link in the chain. With 21st century technology, file-sharing and increasingly ‘free music’, for how much longer? This is a soundly-researched, well-informed but very sobering read. | |
| Buy? Yes | Borrow? Yes |
| Pages: 368 | Date: October 2016 |
| Publisher: Vintage | |
| ISBN: 9780099590453 | |
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The popular music business has always been about – well, business – and some might say that music comes a poor second. Ever since the advent of the 78 r.p.m. disc, record companies have competed with each other and sought new ways of marketing their goods. The songwriter, or if you like the person or partnership at the controls of ‘the song machine’, has long been a vital link in the chain. In today’s climate of increasingly free music, how much does this still hold true?
Many authors have supplied us with books on how to make a hit record. As others have observed, there is no absolute answer – if there was, every record ever made would be a hit. Sinclair examines the process from the early 1990s onwards, by which time ‘the machine’ was a very different beast from the old Tin Pan Alley business model of a generation or so earlier. Before I start to talk about ‘manufactured acts’, some of you will point out that fifty years ago the Beatles, Rolling Stones, Monkees and Status Quo were all manufactured to some extent by their managers and others behind the scenes, but as time has proved, they all had not only luck and sheer dogged persistence but also the magic ingredient (in other words, talent) that transcended that of the nine-day wonder. In the last couple of decades, the new hitmakers have exerted a firmer grasp on the concept of pop star or group as a disposable commodity. Exploit them while they’re hot, and when their teen audience grows tired of them, move on and find someone else.
Being a New Yorker staff writer, Seabrook writes mainly from an American perspective, although the British household names of the era that he mentions also crossed the Atlantic to become successful there as well. He starts with the machine-made electropop of the mid-1970s from German synthesiser act Kraftwerk and disco diva Donna Summer, who although she was American found that working with European producers and songwriters were central to helping her kick-start a flagging career on more than one occasion. From there it is a swift journey to the hit factories, where early pioneers such as producer Phil Spector and Motown founder Berry Gordy had their parallels in the likes of later entrepreneurs and talent scouts like Sandy Jay Pearlman and Clive Calder, Swedish DJ Denniz PoP and veteran producer turned music company executive Clive Davis. The 1990s belonged in part to New Kids On The Block, the Backstreet Boys, and the Spice Girls, none of whom had the staying power of the groups I mentioned in the previous paragraph. The machine rumbled on over the new millennium with a procession led by Britney Spears, Kelly Clarkson, Rihanna – oh yes, and Simon Cowell, whose ‘X Factor’ has had a remarkable ability to create here-today gone-tomorrow stars.
What made the situation harder for the music industry was nemesis in the form of new technology, which gave birth to Napster and its offspring. In the early 1980s, record companies protested that ‘home taping is killing music’. It never did – but file-sharing proved to be the enemy. Where we once went out and bought singles, albums and then CDs, now we can obtain the music at minimal cost or less at the click of a mouse. In 1965 a single by The Seekers, ‘The Carnival Is Over’, was selling 93,000 copies a day at its peak - and that’s not an isolated example. How times have changed since then. There is, it seems, no real money to be made thus any more. Songwriters no longer find it worth their while to perfect their skills, and as one of the concluding chapters observes, if they cannot afford to work, ‘then the whole hit-making apparatus of the song machine is doomed.’
This book is a soundly-researched, well-informed read. Seabrook has spoken to the movers and shakers, delved thoroughly behind the scenes, and analysed the successes, the failures, and where people went right – or wrong. But for anybody who has grown up with and loved pop music for the best part of a lifetime, or for younger people hoping to make a career in a rapidly contracting field with less and less opportunities (don’t put your daughter in the recording studio, Mrs Worthington, with apologies to Noel Coward), it is a very sobering one.
For further reading, look no further than the title recommended as this book’s ‘Amazon algorithmic buddy’, How Music Got Free: The Inventor, the Music Man, and the Thief by Stephen Witt, which tells a parallel story in how the music industry fell victim to the digital age or for a fuller perspective on the industry from the nineteenth century to the present, Electric Shock: From the Gramophone to the iPhone - 125 Years of Pop by Peter Doggett. Black Vinyl, White Powder by Simon Napier-Bell, might be regarded as something of a prequel.
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