Wall Street Journal Review

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Rihanna’s Svengali’s

Christopher Carroll

Early in “The Song Machine,” his fascinating account of the inner workings of the pop music business, John Seabrook recalls mornings spent driving his young son to school. Each day his son would listen to contemporary hits radio (CHR)—what used to be called Top 40. Raised on rock, Mr. Seabrook found new pop strange and unpalatable, not “soulful ballads played by the singer-songwriter” but “industrial-strength products” best heard in “malls, stadiums, airports, casinos.” And yet he found that he was more and more drawn in. When his son made a passing comment that four hits sung by four very different pop stars had all been made by the same producer, Mr. Seabrook was shocked. He realized how little he knew about the people behind the hits on CHR—“the Spielbergs and Lucases of our national headphones”—and resolved “to find out more about who created these strange new songs, how they were made, and why they sounded the way they did.”

Adapted from pieces in the New Yorker, “The Song Machine” is lively, entertaining and often insightful, of interest both to pop mavens and to those who couldn’t imagine caring about the latest hits. Mr. Seabrook focuses on a cross section of important figures in the pop world—stars, producers, singers, songwriters, record and tech executives, and one delightfully wheedling, unctuous manager—and the ways in which they attempt to turn a profit in a business in which world-wide revenues have declined from a peak of $27 billion in 1999 to $15 billion in 2014.

In spite of the considerable changes that have taken place in the past 15-odd years—the rise of file-sharing software, iTunes and streaming services like Spotify—the pop music industry today makes money in much the same way as in the 1950s. It relies on hits—more so, in fact, than ever before. Roughly 90% of the industry’s revenue, Mr. Seabrook writes, comes from 10% of the songs, and a handful of A-list artists generate most of this. But almost none of these artists write their own songs. That job falls to the hitmakers, a group of producers and songwriters who, over the past 20 years, have gradually refined most of the guesswork out of hit-making.

ENLARGE

Their approach to songwriting, far from the solitary composer laboring at a piano, is more akin to a workshop. It most often involves what Mr. Seabrook calls the track-and-hook method. First a producer, often working with a number of other producers and engineers, creates the track—made up of the beats, the rhythmic underpinnings of any pop song, consisting almost entirely of synthesized and sampled audio. Producers write a number of tracks in a day and send them in MP3 form to the topliners. These are the Cyranos of the music industry, vocalists who supply the song’s melodies, which consist mainly of short, catchy, repetitive “hooks.” It is not uncommon for producers to send the same track to multiple topliners, picking and choosing elements from the different submissions.

The meaning of the lyrics that topliners come up with is generally a secondary concern. One of the best parts of Mr. Seabrook’s book describes the elite topliner Ester Dean listening to a track prepared by the Norwegian producing duo Stargate and then improvising a vocal line in response. Taking the form at first of only inchoate sounds, then snatches of words (drawn from a list she keeps on her BlackBerry), the lines she created, Mr. Seabrook writes, were “more like vocalized beats than like lyrics, and they didn’t communicate meaning so much as feeling and attitude.” Once the lyrics have coalesced and a good take has been recorded, the producers set about reordering the audio into a more traditional song structure.

Only after all of this does a song find its way to an artist, who rerecords it, adding his or her personal touch. Some artists are more involved in the process than others, but even those who make almost no rewrites to a song still get a songwriting credit and thus a share of the publishing royalties (“change a word, get a third,” the saying goes). In the hands of the right producer and topliner, this method is as close to a guaranteed hit as one can get, but it tends to yield a sameness of sound.

As Mr. Seabrook observes, most pop artists today are less artists than vocal personalities. The real money to be made is in live shows, and hits are desirable not just because they generate revenue from album or single sales, but because they fill stadiums. Many artists are so busy touring that they have time to record new tracks only while en route from one show to another. (Rihanna, for instance, has recorded hits on her tour bus.) “You can have two or three hot singles on an album, or no singles,” says Tor Hermansen, one of the two producers who make up Stargate, “and that’s the difference between selling five million copies worldwide and launching an eighty-date sold-out world tour, and selling two hundred thousand copies and having no tour. That’s, like, a twenty-million-dollar difference.”

Mr. Seabrook writes that Mr. Hermansen compares his songs to “new flavors awaiting the right soft-drink or potato-chip maker to come along and incorporate them into a product.” It’s an apt description, certainly, but it’s also hard to know what to make of a composer who would enthusiastically liken his music to a bag of Ruffles. As an overview of the pop music world and the people who make it function, Mr. Seabrook’s book, though at times diffuse, is an unquestionable success. Readers, moreover, will be hard-pressed not to admire the skill involved in creating songs so “painstakingly crafted to tweak the brain’s delight in melody, rhythm, and repetition.”

But while Mr. Seabrook evokes the beguiling nature of the music, the way in which it leaves listeners craving more, it is unclear whether he thinks that the songwriting method he has so wonderfully documented can create only disposable, confectionary commodities, or if it’s perhaps capable of something more.

Mr. Carroll is on the editorial staff of the New York Review of Books.

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