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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For modern pop music, its usually a team of writers as others have said. But even more than that its samples. If a song uses 4-5 samples from different records those songwriters all will get credit and could easily put the number of writers into double digits
Someone goes “hey how about instead of ‘filling with your endless love’ you say ‘filling with your thrilling love’?”
Bang. Can’t deny their input. That’s a songwriting credit. They’ll get a smaller slice of the pie but the list of names doesn’t denote who wrote how much. Sometimes every writer did a couplet or a section. Sometimes one wrote 90% completely, one edited in 10%, and two negotiated songwriting credits in their contract so they were allowed to sit in on the session.
I suspect that the truth is a bit more sinister than other comments are acknowledging. There’s a saying the in the music industry – “change a word, get a third”, i.e. a minimal adjustment to a song results in a songwriting credit that gets that person paid further down the road. And this, I think, is how a lot of industry people get paid – not up front, but by carving royalties away from the actual songwriter.
I’m a songwriter and work in the pop industry. All that’s happening is that multiple people work on one song to get it to its final stage. Two or three people might get together to write the lyrics and melody to a song, that song might then get sent to other writers for review/input/editing, then sent to an artist who might go into the studio with a couple other people who all get points for any (even slight) stylistic/lyrical modifications. By the time a song is released, it has been heard and adjusted by so many people, and most of those people deserve some kind of credit if they’ve had any influence on the final sound. Not to mention that we have to give credit to anyone who we may have ripped off (even without noticing) in order to avoid a lawsuit.
Pop artists typically aren’t artists. They’re selected because they’re attractive and can be taught to dance, and if you put their photo on an album it sells.
So then the record label hires a bunch of unattractive people with tons of talent to write (and often record) the music for them.
Because it’s industry-made music created for money. Not artist-made music created for artistic purposes. So it’s generally best to write (most of) the song beforehand, shop it out to a pop artists/their label and then have them (slightly) rework/polish the pop song in to something that’s “their’s.” Thats usually done with a different set of people who produce that artists “sound.” For example, many big pop artists have a specific engineer who handles their vocal production and mixing. It’s very specialized because it generates a lot of money. And honestly, a lot of pop music is pretty formulaic.
Because they’re not written by the artist any more. They’re written in a corporate board room by statisticians and “industry professionals” who work on bits here and there.
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