Why do many pop songs have so many different songwriters listed?

Question

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?

In: 120

Answer 1

Studios that produce pop music typically have in-house songwriters. They might work collaboratively, they might reuse ideas from each others’ work, they might even dig up unused lyrics written by someone else and add their own elements. When people say that pop music is produced in an assembly line, that’s not an indictment, it’s an observation.