The Song Machine: Inside the Hit Factory

Another common problem hit factories suffer is that the balance of power between the artists and the writers and producers tends to change over time. At the beginning, the artists are regarded as mere hired hands by the writers and the producers, who are the real artists in the operation. But with success, the artists come to feel that they are, in fact, real artists—everything about the way they are sold to the world confirms it. They demand, at a minimum, more respect from their songwriters and producers, and they usually insist on more creative control over the songs. Some want to write their own material, often with disastrous results.

As Denniz once said, in response to a question about how hard could it possibly be to write such simple songs, “it’s much more difficult to make it simple, especially achieving a simplicity without having it sound incredibly trivial

It wasn’t a luxurious car and it always needed a wash, but Denniz relied on it to test songs in; he knew that one of the keys to popular success in the United States was making songs that sounded good in the car.

A recorded song has two principal sets of rights—the publishing and the master recording. The publishing covers the copyright of the composition, and the master is the sound-recording copyright. The master is the real estate; the publishing is the mineral rights under the land, and the air rights

Ninety percent of the revenues in the record business come from ten percent of the songs

Toth is a fan of Girls’ Generation. At the time he stumbled across the girls on YouTube, Toth was an alt-rock guy; he loved Weezer.

But by 1998, it was hip to be square again.

In a documentary that appeared on Swedish national television (STV) in 1997, Denniz told a reporter, “It’s easy to say producing this music is equal to pushing a button in the studio. But that’s like saying writing a novel is a simple push of a button on your typewriter.” Denniz liked to say that no matter how technically adept you were at programming, sometimes you just had to “let art win.”

Andreas Carlsson says, “That idea seemed absurd, because Sweden was very disconnected from the international music market at that time. The profession of songwriting wasn’t even invented yet in Sweden.”

He was the Steven Spielberg of pop.” He got bored easily, and his friends invested a lot of energy in keeping him happy.