I see so many songs with 3-5 or more listed in the credits. I always thought sometimes one person wrote music, and another wrote lyrics. Why can it take around 5 people to write a song?
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Others have covered most of the modern pop aspect well (maybe missing a few details on the usual workflow, but you get the gist), but there’s also a few important details in retrospect: going by modern industry (nominal) standards, a whole lot of people in many decades’ worth of recorded music *should* have songwriting credits but don’t.
First there’s the more obvious thing which is ghostwriters. Their existence is an open secret, and incidentally enough they’re the reason certain film composers are seemingly so prolific (but that’s a topic for another day). And while there’s a whole can of worms as to how much you can “own” a certain bunch of notes or chord progression, deliberate interpolation/adaptation of other people’s music (and also accidental occurrences of such) is the “secret technique” many songwriters use to quickly come up with new music.
Then there’s the role of producers, hired musicians, and even fellow bandmembers. The line may get blurry as to how much is just (usually uncrefited) arrangement and how much is new composition, but that doesn’t change the fact a whole lot of music (including many parts which are subsequently treated as essential to the song, at least in the public consciousness) gets created on top of the (many times barebones) original compositions. We can get into a discussion of to whether or to what degree these rise to the legal/industry standards for “songwriting”, but most people would agree at least some do, and in fact some have successfully sued for retroactive credits.
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