This week I decided to read something a bit different, The Song Machine by John Seabrook, which details how many of the most recent biggest hit songs came into being and the effects that changing technology has had on the music business. Early in the book Seabrook asks a question, that very rarely gets asked, because the answer seems like it should be obvious, he asks:
Who are the hit makers? They are enormously influential culture shapers–the Spielbergs and Lucases of our national headphones–and yet they are mostly anonymous. Directors of films are public figures, but the people behind pop songs remain in the shadows, taking aliases, by necessity if not by choice, in order to preserve the illusion that the singer is the author of the song.
It’s generally common knowledge that most major artists these days, at least in pop music, although other genres as well, do not write their own songs. What is less commonly known is that there are generally a small handful of people behind most of the biggest hits that dominate the charts.
While it is nice to picture an artist working away and carefully, painstakingly, crafting the lyrics to a song, the reality is quite a bit different. Lyrics, often by many different writers, are swapped between songs to find something that fits the music. There are even different specializations in which certain people write only specific parts of songs, such as verses or choruses. Although it is disappointing to shatter the illusion, it is also hard to argue with the results, at least in terms of producing hits.
As technology has shifted the importance of a hit single has only grown. Whereas previously a hit single was generally all that was needed to drive album sales, the shift to an iTunes model meant you no longer had to buy the album to get the single. Meaning artists need to put out singles more frequently to continue driving sales, further increasing the importance of hits. Now the shift towards steaming is causing a new shakeup in the music business, as people no longer even need to buy the hit single.
One of the main ways in which a song becomes a hit is through repetition. Pop stations typically play the same few songs in a heavy rotation, ensuring maximum exposure whenever we might happen to tune in. There is a biological reason why repetition works so well, and how upon subsequent listens, a song will typically grow on us. Seabrook quotes from another book to explain this:
But why does hearing a song over and over again make us like it? In her 2014 book On Repeat: How Music Plays the Mind, Elizabeth Margulis, who is the director of the Music Cognition Lab at the University of Arkansas, explores this topic. She explains, “When we know what’s coming next in a tune, we lean forward when listening, imagining the next bit before it actually comes. This kind of listening ahead builds a sense of participation with the music.” The songs in heavy rotation are “executing our volition after the fact.” The imagined participation encouraged by familiar music, she adds, is experienced by many people as highly pleasurable, since it mimics a kind of social communion.
This reason not only explains how a song gets to be a hit, but why we continue to want to hear the same older songs years or even decades later, beyond just for a sense of nostalgia. Beyond just entertainment, music has the power to bring back memories of good times we have had, or to comfort us when we are upset. It’s often when we are sad or want to reminisce that we can turn to our old favorites and get a warm feeling as we commune with the music.
Music can also be highly integrated into our memory, just hearing a song can cause us to remember where we were or what we were doing when we first heard it and even after years without hearing a song we can often still recall the lyrics, without even trying, when we finally do hear it.
While thinking about music and the effects it can have on us, I was reminded of a famous music lover, Thomas Jefferson, and what his biographer, Jon Meacham had to say about his love of music in Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power:
As always, music was Jefferson’s ally. To him singing or the playing of the violin or the pianoforte was more than entertainment, more than the means of passing the hours when time grew heavy. Music, rather, offered a window into a man’s soul–or into a woman’s.
Jefferson did not just enjoy listening to music, but also played it as well. At that time of course if one wanted to hear music frequently you either had to learn how to play it yourself, or know someone else that could, making it much more important and common for someone to be able to play at least one musical instrument.
At one point in the book, Meacham quotes some advice which Jefferson gave to his daughter, a beautiful statement, comparing each person that we might meet to a slightly flawed piece of music, which we should still value greatly, despite its, or their, flaws.
He advised his daughter Patsy to approach all people and all things with forbearance. “Every human being, my dear, must thus be viewed according to what it is good for, for none of us, no not one, is perfect; and were we to love none who had imperfections this world would be a desert for our love,” Jefferson wrote in July 1790. “All we can do is to make the best of our friends: love and cherish what is good in them, and keep out of the way of what is bad: but no more think of rejecting them for it than of throwing away a piece of music for a flat passage or two.”
Music can deeply affect us, shaping our taste, style, even who we choose as our friends. Given the important role music can play in our lives, having an understanding of how it is made, and who is actually creating it can be interesting, although perhaps it’s better to just sit back and enjoy the music.