Songwriting teams have created some of my very favorite songs: Rogers & Hart, Rodgers & Hammerstein, Kander & Ebb, Lerner & Loew, Bock & Harnick, Lennon & McCartney, Carole King and Gerry Goffin, Jagger and Richards, Bernie Taupin and Elton John, Bacharach & David, Leiber & Stoller, Ashford & Simpson, Holland/Dozier/Holland, and hundreds more. Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim on "West Side Story" weren't too bad either.

Many of the biggest hits of today are written exactly this way. Billie Eilish and her brother Finneas, Taylor Swift and a lot of different collaborators (but usually only one on a song). Adele co-writes with a few trusted collaborators. Ed Sheeran and Lana del Rey are also pretty famous for collaborating with many artists. I don't see how Billie Eilish and her brother and Adele and her collaborators are any different from Lennon & McCartney, in terms of the technical process of songwriting. The difference is how people of different generations respond to the results.

Nowadays the majority of songs begin with a producer or producers. They create the original track, which doesn't have any lyrics. It's just a pop arrangement. Then you can bring in "topliners" who improvise over it. If the topliners don't deliver, they just bring in more topliners. The lyrics are just raw material and are edited into something that sounds like a song. Then they bring in a singer/star, who makes their contribution and possibly records it.

More common are songs written in rooms by many people at the same time. Usually at least three people--a producer with a DAW, a songwriter, and a singer/star. They work for a day and at the end of the day there's a song. There are also camps that songwriters are paid to go to and write with others. If there are three songwriters in a room with two producers, and then laterr it goes to the star, you can see how there can be a lot of credited songwriters.

This system is rooted in the Nashville Room. A lot of people gathered in a room to write a song. The result was credited to whoever was in the room, regardless of how big or small their contribution was.

I read an article about Amy Rose Allen, who co-wrote "Espresso" and other hits with Sabrina Carpenter. She also collaborated with Dua Lipa, Harry Styles, Justin Bieber, Selena Gomez, Halsey, Shawn Mendes, etc. And she said something like, "Okay I had this huge hit, but before that, I wrote hundreds of songs that didn't go anywhere."

This is the way the modern music business works. It's not just the US. A lot of K-pop and other world hits are written by Max Martin and other Swedes. But I am old enough to remember what the 60s was actually like, and we had song factories from the likes of Don Kershner. Yes, it was the time of the Beatles, but also The Archies and The Monkees. And The Wrecking Crew and the Motown house band played on most of the songs. And some of these "products" were amazing, just as a lot of the pop factory songs of today are equally amazing.

Personally I find Taylor Swift's "Cruel Summer" and the K-Pop Demon Hunters' "Golden" to be irresistible. Just like "Louie Louie" and "Wipe-Out," and the oeuvre of Paul Revere & the Raiders, when I played them in bands as a teenager.

But are these pop hits as meaningful to me as songs by Mitski, who writes all her songs? No, her work touches me in a deeper way. But I had to find her work and listen to it. But that's the way it was when I was a teenager too. Tim Buckley's albums never charted, but I loved them. The first Velvet Underground album went nowhere. There's a lot of good stuff out there if you are willing to look and take the time to seek it out. A ton more songs than I have time to listen to--because I have my own songs to write. : )

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