The hit factory

The sheet music of Alexander's Ragtime Band carried one name in 1911: Irving Berlin. The credits of Blinding Lights by The Weeknd list five in 2019. Between the two lies more than a century in which pop music became more and more of a trade, with offices, deadlines, permanent studio bands and writers who sat down at the piano every day at nine o'clock.

The image of the pop star who writes a song alone in his room is true for only part of the history. A large share of the hits you know were made by teams: writers who come up with the melody, lyricists, producers, arrangers and studio musicians. They worked in New York, Detroit, Stockholm and London, and they used fixed forms, fixed chords and fixed tricks. That raises a question that comes back with every hit: is a hit something you make, or something that happens to you?

In the late nineteenth century dozens of music publishers settled in New York on the same stretch of street: West 28th Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenue in Manhattan. Every office had a piano, and every piano was played all day to try out new songs. On warm days the windows were open. Passers-by then heard a cacophony of rattling pianos all mixed together, like someone banging on pots and pans. That is how the street got its nickname: Tin Pan Alley, the alley of the tin pans. In Mixtape 1 (The birth of pop music) this street already appeared as one of the sources of pop music. Here we look at how the work was done.

The product of Tin Pan Alley was not a recording but sheet music. Around 1900 many American living rooms had a piano, and anyone who wanted to hear a new song had to play it themselves. A publisher earned money on every copy sold. A successful song could go over the counter hundreds of thousands of times. Gramophone records did exist, but only after the 1920s did they become the main product of the music industry.

To sell songs, the public first had to hear them. For that the publishers had song pluggers: pianists and singers who played new numbers in department stores, music shops and theatres. They also tried to persuade well-known performers to include a song in their show. A song that was heard in a popular revue sold better. George Gershwin, too, began his career as a teenager as a song plugger at a publisher in Tin Pan Alley.

From the 1920s the writers mostly worked to a fixed form: the 32-bar AABA form. A song then consists of four sections of eight bars. The first section (A) brings the melody and usually the title. The second section (A) repeats that melody with new words. Then comes the B, the bridge: a section with a different melody and often different chords, which gives contrast. The last section is A again, so that the listener returns to what he already knows. Over the Rainbow (1939) is a well-known example: twice "Somewhere over the rainbow", then a bridge that begins with "Someday I'll wish upon a star", and then the opening melody again. That form is short, clear and easy to remember. Exactly what a publisher needed.

The stars of Tin Pan Alley were the writers, not the singers. Irving Berlin, George Gershwin and Cole Porter wrote hundreds of songs, first for sheet music and later for Broadway musicals and Hollywood films. Berlin is a good example of how much of a craft that work was. He could only play the piano in F sharp major, on the black keys. So he had a transposing piano built: with a lever under the keyboard the whole mechanism shifted, so that he kept playing in F sharp while the piano sounded in another key.

In 1914 writers and publishers in New York founded ASCAP, an organisation that collects money when their music is performed in public. This created the idea that a song is a property you earn from, regardless of who sings it. That idea returns at the end of this chapter, in the long lists of names under modern hits.

When radio and sound film became the main channel in the 1920s and 1930s, sheet music lost ground and the publishers moved to Broadway and Hollywood. The songs stayed. Many of the standards that jazz musicians still play come from Tin Pan Alley and Broadway. Music that was made as a commodity is now regarded as classical repertoire.

After the Second World War a new audience appeared: teenagers with pocket money, a radio of their own and a record player. Rock 'n' roll had shown that they wanted their own music (see Mixtape 2, Youth cultures 1950-1980). In the late 1950s the music industry in New York reorganised itself around that audience, this time on Broadway. In the Brill Building, at number 1619, and in the building next door at number 1650, dozens of publishers, managers and record companies sat on top of one another.

In those buildings young writing duos worked in small rooms containing little more than a piano, a stool and a table. Publisher Don Kirshner had a whole stable of writers under contract with his company Aldon Music at number 1650. They came in in the morning and wrote until the evening. If Kirshner heard that an artist needed a new single, he put several duos on the same assignment. The best song won.

The best-known duos were married couples or friends: Carole King and Gerry Goffin, Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, Ellie Greenwich and Jeff Barry. The division of labour was often clear. Carole King wrote the music, Gerry Goffin the words. They had only just become adults themselves and wrote about what occupied teenagers: being in love, jealousy, the question of whether he would still call tomorrow. Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, the writers of Hound Dog (see Mixtape 10), also worked from this circuit.

Will You Love Me Tomorrow, sung by The Shirelles, became a number 1 in the United States in 1961, the first by a Black girl group. The lyrics ask a question that is strikingly direct for a pop song of that time: will he still love me tomorrow, after this night? The strings and the calm, rolling accompaniment make it a small drama of less than three minutes.

How close writing and releasing lay together is shown by The Loco-Motion. Eva Boyd was Goffin and King's babysitter. Because she could sing well, she recorded the demo: the trial recording with which a writer tries to sell a song to an artist. That demo sounded so good that it came out as a single, under the name Little Eva. In 1962 the track topped the American chart.

What the writers in New York came up with was often recorded elsewhere. Producer Phil Spector worked in the Gold Star Studios in Los Angeles with a regular group of studio musicians, later known as The Wrecking Crew. Spector built a sound that he called the Wall of Sound. He had instruments double and triple up: two or three pianos, several acoustic guitars strumming the same chord, horns, strings and percussion. All that sound he sent through a small echo chamber. As a result you hardly hear individual instruments. You hear one big, thick sound that still sounds full over the small speaker of a transistor radio.

Be My Baby by The Ronettes (1963), written by Spector with Ellie Greenwich and Jeff Barry, is the textbook example. The track opens with nothing but a short drum pattern by Hal Blaine: three dull beats on the bass drum and one hard crack on the snare. Then the wall opens. That drum intro has been imitated countless times, by bands from the 1960s to artists of today.

The Brill Building model had a weak spot. It counted on artists singing the songs that others wrote for them. From 1963 The Beatles (see Mixtape 3) showed that a band could write its own material, and that this appealed to the public. They also played songs by the Brill writers themselves, such as Chains by Goffin and King. But after 1964 every new band wanted its own songs. The writers in the little rooms lost their customers. Some of them started singing themselves: with the album Tapestry (1971) Carole King became one of the best-known singer-songwriters of her time.

Detroit was the city of cars. Berry Gordy had worked on Ford's assembly line before he started writing songs, among others for singer Jackie Wilson. He noticed that as a writer he earned little: the money went to the record company. So in 1959, with money borrowed from his family, he started a label of his own. He bought a house on West Grand Boulevard, turned the ground floor into a studio and hung a sign on the front: Hitsville U.S.A. In Mixtape 6 (Fear of a Black Planet) Motown appears in the story of Black music. Here the subject is the way Gordy produced hits.

Gordy said himself that he took his model from the car factory. A car comes off the line because every department has its own task and there is an inspection at the end. At Motown it was the same. There were permanent writers and producers, such as the trio Holland-Dozier-Holland (Lamont Dozier and the brothers Brian and Eddie Holland) and Smokey Robinson. There was a permanent studio band, The Funk Brothers, with bassist James Jamerson and drummer Benny Benjamin, among others. And there was an artist development department: there the young singers, often from the poor neighbourhoods of Detroit, learned how to dance, how to dress, and how to behave in an interview or in front of a white audience.

At the end of the line stood the quality control meeting. Every week Gordy and his staff listened to the new recordings and voted on which one would come out as a single. A track could be rejected, re-recorded or given to another artist. The recordings were tested on small speakers, because the public would hear them on a car radio or a portable radio.

The studio itself was small. Studio A, known locally as the Snakepit, was in a converted room of the house. The musicians sat close together and recorded whatever was on that day, often for several artists in a row. The Funk Brothers played on hundreds of hits, but their names were not on the records. Only with the documentary Standing in the Shadows of Motown (2002) did they get the recognition they deserved.

What Motown sounds like, you hear in Where Did Our Love Go by The Supremes (1964), written and produced by Holland-Dozier-Holland. The track begins with a stomping rhythm: people stamping their feet on a wooden plank, on every beat. That is the Motown backbeat, a four-beat bar in which every beat carries equal weight, easy to dance to and to clap along with. Diana Ross sings low and restrained, the other two Supremes answer with "baby, baby". It became the first of five consecutive number 1s for the group.

The assembly line also had a drawback: the system revolved around Gordy's decisions. That is shown by I Heard It Through the Grapevine, written by Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong. Smokey Robinson & the Miracles were the first to record it in 1966, followed by Marvin Gaye, but Gordy did not want to release either version as a single. Gladys Knight & the Pips had a hit with it in 1967. Gaye's version appeared in 1968 only on an album. When radio DJs started playing the track from that record anyway, it was released as a single after all and became a number 1. Gaye's version is darker and slower, with a dark intro and a singer who sounds as if he has just heard bad news.

Motown called the result of all that work "The Sound of Young America". That was ambitious: Black music, made by Black writers, musicians and singers, for a white and a Black audience, in a country where schools and concert halls were still often segregated. In 1972 Gordy moved the company to Los Angeles. The old house in Detroit is now the Motown Museum. Studio A is still there, as it looked in the 1960s.

On 6 April 1974 a Swedish group won the Eurovision Song Contest in Brighton, on the English south coast. ABBA sang Waterloo, a song that uses Napoleon's defeat as an image for someone who surrenders in love. The group wore glitter costumes and the conductor was dressed as Napoleon. Within weeks Waterloo was number 1 in the UK and in a large part of Europe. It was the beginning of one of the most successful pop groups of the twentieth century.

ABBA consisted of two couples: Agnetha Fältskog and Björn Ulvaeus, and Anni-Frid Lyngstad and Benny Andersson. The two women sang, the two men wrote. Björn and Benny had played in Swedish pop groups in the 1960s, the Hootenanny Singers and the Hep Stars, and had worked as a writing team ever since. The division was clear: together they made the music, Björn mostly wrote the lyrics. Those lyrics were in English, a language that was not his own. Sometimes they sound a little stiff or simple, but they sing well and everyone in Europe could understand them.

The secret of ABBA lay in the combination of a strong melody and careful production. Every track has a hook: the catchy bit of melody or lyric that you remember after hearing it once. The voices of Agnetha and Frida were recorded over one another several times, so that they sound like a choir. Sound engineer Michael B. Tretow made sure of a crystal-clear sound in the studios in Stockholm, in which every instrument has its own place. Tretow borrowed the doubling from Spector's Wall of Sound, but where with Spector everything melts together, with ABBA every instrument stays audible.

Dancing Queen (1976) shows how cleverly those songs are put together. After a piano glissando and a short instrumental introduction the track does not begin with a verse but with a piece of the chorus: "You can dance, you can jive". So the listener hears the strongest moment straight away. Only then comes the verse about the seventeen-year-old girl on the dance floor, and then the chorus returns in full. It was ABBA's only number 1 in the United States.

ABBA was only the beginning. From the 1970s Sweden built an industry of its own for hits, with studios, publishers and managers used to working for the world market. In the 1980s and 1990s Roxette, Ace of Base and The Cardigans followed. Many Swedish producers point to the municipal music schools, the kulturskolan, as one of the reasons: almost every child could learn to play an instrument there cheaply or for free. A country of nine million inhabitants thus delivered a disproportionate share of the world's hits. On track 3 we return to Stockholm.

In the 1980s London got a hit factory of its own. Mike Stock, Matt Aitken and Pete Waterman, together Stock Aitken Waterman or SAW for short, had a studio in the Borough, a district in south London. They called it The Hit Factory themselves. Stock and Aitken were the musicians and wrote the tracks. Waterman, a former DJ, was the man with an ear for the market and for the business side.

Their first big success was You Spin Me Round (Like a Record) by Dead or Alive, a number 1 in the UK in 1985. The tempo was that of hi-NRG, the fast dance music that had grown out of I Feel Love by Donna Summer (see Mixtape 8). After that they turned the process around. An ordinary band first writes songs and then looks for a producer. SAW first made the music and then looked for a singer to go with it. Rick Astley, Kylie Minogue, Bananarama, Jason Donovan: they all came into SAW to sing a track that was already largely finished.

The tracks followed a fixed formula. The tempo was high, around the speed of hi-NRG. The rhythm came from a drum machine. The synthesizer bass played a short, bouncing figure that often jumped back and forth between two octaves. The melody was simple and the choruses were repeated. Towards the end the whole track often went up a step: a key change, which gives the last chorus extra energy. In English that trick is also called the truck driver's gear change, as if a lorry shifts up a gear.

Never Gonna Give You Up (1987) is the best-known example. Rick Astley worked as an assistant in SAW's studio before he was allowed to sing there himself. His deep, grown-up voice surprised the public: whoever heard him expected a much older man than the 21-year-old in the video. The track was number 1 in 25 countries. The drums come from a LinnDrum, a drum machine that worked with recordings of real drums. Twenty years later the track got a second life as an internet prank: with rickrolling you get a link that promises to show you something else, but ends up at this video.

The story of Kylie Minogue shows how fast they worked. In 1987 she was known as an actress in the Australian soap Neighbours. When she came to London for a recording session, it turned out that SAW had forgotten she was coming. There was no song ready. While Kylie waited outside, Stock and Aitken wrote I Should Be So Lucky in about forty minutes. It became a number 1 in the UK and Australia, and the start of a career that continues to this day.

Critics did not think much of SAW. They called it assembly-line work: all the tracks sounded the same, the singers were interchangeable and there was no personal story behind it. The public thought differently. In a few years SAW made more than a hundred hits in the British top 40. Pete Waterman later sat on the jury of television talent shows, such as Pop Idol. That turned the hit factory itself into a TV programme: the public watched as an unknown singer was selected, styled and prepared for the charts.

In 1992 the Swedish producer Denniz PoP opened the Cheiron Studio in Stockholm. He had success with Ace of Base and gathered a group of young writers and producers around him. One of them was Martin Sandberg, a singer from a Swedish hard rock band, who was given the name Max Martin by Denniz PoP. After Denniz PoP's death in 1998 Martin became the most important man in the studio.

From Cheiron, Martin and his colleagues wrote and produced the hits of a new generation of American teen stars in the late 1990s: the Backstreet Boys, *NSYNC and Britney Spears. They worked like SAW and Motown: the music was made in Stockholm, and the singers came by to sing their part.

...Baby One More Time (1998) was first offered to the American r&b group TLC, who turned it down. Then it went to Britney Spears, then sixteen years old. The track opens with three heavy piano notes and then straight away the voice: "Oh baby, baby". The hook is already there in the first seconds. The lyrics show how Martin deals with English. With "hit me baby one more time" he meant "call me one more time", because he thought that hit me meant "call me" in American slang. To American ears it sounded very different. That the English lyrics of a Swede sometimes sound strange evidently does not stand in the way of success.

Martin works with what is called melodic math in English. The rules are simple. Every line of lyrics has about as many syllables as the line it rhymes with, so that the pattern is predictable. On the long, high notes are vowels that sing well, such as an open "ah" or "ay". And the hook comes back as often as possible. What the words mean is less important than how they sound. The Backstreet Boys have said of I Want It That Way (1999) that the lyrics do not quite make sense: in one verse the narrator wants it "that way", in the next it is suddenly different. Martin mostly wanted the vowels to sing nicely. That too is craft.

Cheiron closed in 2000, but Martin kept working, first in Stockholm and later in Los Angeles too. He wrote and produced for Kelly Clarkson, Katy Perry, Pink, The Weeknd, Ariana Grande and Taylor Swift. With Swift and the Swedish producer Shellback he made the album 1989 (2014), with which she made the switch from country to pop. On Shake It Off you hear a horn section with saxophone and a rhythm of handclaps and shouted voices, as on a sports field with cheerleaders.

Measured in number 1s on the American Billboard Hot 100, Max Martin is the most successful songwriter ever after Paul McCartney; he overtook John Lennon in 2024. Yet the general public hardly knows his face. He rarely gives interviews and almost never appears on a stage. That fits the tradition of the hit factory: from the Funk Brothers to the writers in the Brill Building, the makers often stayed behind the scenes.

A pop song is built from fixed sections. Which sections these are and in which order they come is called the song form. That form has changed considerably in a hundred years, and every change is connected with the way people heard and bought music.

In Tin Pan Alley the 32-bar AABA form became the standard from the 1920s (see track 1 of side A). The title is in the A, often on the first or last line, and so comes back three times. The B is the bridge, which gives contrast before the A sounds for the last time. Such a 32-bar song was usually played a few times in a row, sometimes with an instrumental solo in between.

Around 1965 a different form became the norm: verse and chorus. The verse tells the story; every verse has the same melody but different words. The chorus is the same every time, melody and words. It is the high point of the track and carries the title. Verse, chorus, verse, chorus, a bridge or solo, and one or two more choruses: that is how most pop music since the 1960s is built.

From the 1980s, and certainly from 2000, sections were added. Between verse and chorus there is often a pre-chorus: a short build-up that lets the tension rise, so that the chorus hits harder. And after the chorus there is sometimes a post-chorus: a section that repeats the hook once more, often with few or no real words.

Umbrella by Rihanna (2007) is the clearest example of this. The chorus ends on the word "umbrella", and then Rihanna chops that word into pieces: "ella, ella, eh, eh, eh". That section is the post-chorus, a second hook on top of the first. The track was written by Terius "The-Dream" Nash and Christopher "Tricky" Stewart, with Kuk Harrell and Jay-Z. It was first offered to Britney Spears, but her record company let it go. That is how songs circulate in the hit factory, until an artist says yes.

The streaming era has changed the form again. A streaming service such as Spotify counts a stream only when someone has listened for at least thirty seconds. A track that is slow to get going loses listeners who click away before it counts. The intro is therefore often short, the hook arrives within thirty seconds, and the whole track often lasts less than three minutes. The average length of a hit in the Billboard Hot 100 fell from well over four minutes in 1990 to about three and a half minutes in 2020.

Blinding Lights by The Weeknd (2019) uses those rules, but at the same time sounds like a record from 1985. The track opens straight away with a synthesizer riff that is already a hook in itself. Underneath lies a fast, tight rhythm from a drum machine with the sound of the 1980s. Anyone who has just heard Never Gonna Give You Up recognises the SAW formula: high tempo, a bouncing synth bass, a melody you sing along to at once. Max Martin co-produced. You can read more about the 1980s as a sound in Mixtape 7.

Beneath almost every pop song lies a series of chords that is repeated over and over: the chord progression. Musicians often write such a progression down with Roman numerals instead of with the names of the chords. The numeral shows on which degree of the scale the chord starts. In C major, C is the first degree (I), F the fourth (IV), G the fifth (V) and A the sixth (vi). A capital letter stands for a major chord, a small letter for minor. The advantage of those numerals is that they apply in every key. I-V-vi-IV is in C: C-G-Am-F, and in A: A-E-F#m-D.

That progression, I-V-vi-IV, is the most widely used chord progression in pop music. It begins stable on the root (I), goes to the fifth degree (V) which wants to move forward, drops to a minor chord (vi) that gives a touch of wistfulness, and returns to the start via the fourth degree (IV). That round is short, feels familiar and can be repeated endlessly. Precisely for that reason it suits a chorus you want to sing along to.

The idea is older than pop music. The German composer Johann Pachelbel wrote his Canon in D around 1700. In it the bass plays the same eight notes again and again: D-A-B-F#-G-D-G-A. Above that, three violins keep building new melodies. The first four chords of that progression strongly resemble I-V-vi-IV. The Canon has become an eternal source: pop musicians have used the pattern countless times, sometimes deliberately, more often without knowing it.

In Let It Be by The Beatles (1970) you hear the progression in its purest form. Paul McCartney plays C-G-Am-F on the piano, at a calm tempo, so that you can follow each chord separately. Forty years later Adele uses the same progression in Someone Like You (2011), which she wrote with Dan Wilson. Here it is in A: A-E-F#m-D. The piano does not play the chords as blocks, but as an arpeggio: the notes of each chord sound one after another, like a rolling movement.

The Australian comedy group Axis of Awesome made a well-known sketch of it, 4 Chords. In it they sing dozens of hits in a row over the same progression, from Let It Be and With or Without You by U2 to Don't Stop Believin' by Journey. It works because it fits: a large part of those tracks fit it without difficulty. If you play an instrument yourself, you can try it: play I-V-vi-IV in the key of your instrument and sing a hit over it.

What does that teach us? That the secret of a hit is not in the chords. If thousands of tracks share the same progression, then something else makes the difference: the melody, the rhythm, the sound of the production, the lyrics and the voice. Let It Be and Someone Like You have the same chords, but nobody confuses them.

Look at the credits of a modern hit and you often see five to ten names. That is due to the way people work now. Many hits come out of a songwriting camp: a gathering of a few days to which a record company, publisher or artist invites a group of writers and producers. They work in changing duos and trios, spread over different studios in the same building. At the end of each day there are new tracks, and the best are developed further.

Within such a camp the tasks are divided. The producer makes the beat: the rhythm, the chords, the sounds. The topliner writes the melody and the lyrics on top of that, the line that lies on top of the music. Besides that there is sometimes someone who works only on the lyrics, or someone who contributes one good idea for the hook. Every contribution counts for a share of the rights. Under copyright law it concerns melody and lyrics, but in practice the makers of the beat and the inventors of a riff are also named as writers. That is why the lists are so long. In the Netherlands the income from those rights is collected by Buma/Stemra; in the United States ASCAP and similar organisations do that, as they have since the days of Tin Pan Alley.

The artist sometimes comes in only at the end. He sings the track, changes a few words or a line of melody, and so makes it his own. The credits of Blinding Lights list five writers: Abel Tesfaye (The Weeknd himself), Ahmad Balshe, Jason Quenneville, Max Martin and Oscar Holter. The track became one of the most streamed tracks ever. In 2021 Billboard declared it the most successful track in the history of the Hot 100.

The songwriting camp resembles everything that passed by in this chapter. The little rooms of the Brill Building, the quality control of Motown, the SAW studio where the singer came in last, and the Cheiron Studio in Stockholm: each time it is a team working with fixed forms and fixed tricks, with a clear division of tasks and a deadline. What has changed is mainly the scale. Where Goffin and King wrote a hit as a pair, ten people work on one now.

Does that make a hit less real? That is the question with which this chapter began. Anyone who thinks that music must come from one personal feeling will look at the hit factory with suspicion. But art history has known that model for a long time: painters such as Rubens and Rembrandt worked with a workshop full of pupils and assistants. And the songs of Tin Pan Alley, once made as a commodity for the piano in the living room, are now played by jazz musicians as art. A hit is made, with craftsmanship, tools and many people. Whether it also becomes a hit is still decided in the end by the public.