It seems that at the dawn of the 21st century, popular music reached a completely new stage of development. To write a song, you no longer need to virtuously play the guitar or have a poetic talent, and to sing it you don’t need a powerful voice—welcome to the era of autotune! But there’s one thing to make just a song, and another to create a hit that can instantly make the performer famous and turn the author into a millionaire. By the way, who creates all these masterpieces?
In his book “Song Machine. Inside the Hit Factory,” John Seabrook, an American cultural scholar and journalist, explores the phenomenon of popular music, its impact on modern society, and also breaks down in detail the “anatomy” of a hit, arriving at an interesting conclusion: in such a creative endeavor as making a song, originality is not that important after all. Everything is governed by a strict logic—the “mathematics of melody”—and behind it is an entire team of professionals: producers, top-liners, beatmakers, and lyric writers. Studying the history of how pop hits emerged, Seabrook leads us to another, no less surprising thought: it has been almost like this for almost always.