Source: Billboard; ASCAP/BMI Songview Database

Tools: Excel, Datawrapper

I did a longer write-up here on this trend

Posted by noisymortimer

11 comments

  1. Am I correct in reading that more number one songs are being written by the artists themselves? If so then that is at least a comforting trend, if you’d have asked me to guess I would have said the opposite

  2. what constitutes ‘artist is songwriter?’ Does it mean the artist is given songwriting credit but there could be 3 or 4 others also given credit? I’d be more interested in, ‘artist is sole songwriter’ or ‘no one outside of the core band is given songwriter credit.’

  3. Producer makes sense – production software is more available now than ever and people are starting using it from a young age. That said, in both cases I wonder how much this is actually driven by artists writing/producing and how much is just credit being given. There are tons of stories of artists being given writing credit for basically just being in the room or approving the lyrics after its been written. It’s probably impossible to know what percentage of the growth is that but I’d bet its a large percentage.

  4. I’m curious what the graph would look like if you didn’t count co-writing credits

  5. I’d have expected things to be trending downwards, too, but the most shocking stat for me is that ZERO percent of Billboard songs in the early 40s were written by the artist.

    A few people have wondered what would happen if it didn’t count co-writing credits, but I’d guess that’d just be unhelpful data since most songs have a co-writer today, even for artists like Morgan Wallen or Sabrina Carpenter who largely write their own music.

  6. You have a curve hitting 100%. That just isn’t the case, and never has been. At no time in history has every single hit song performer on the planet actually wrote their own songs.

  9. Is anyone knowledgeable about the music industry willing to explain what happened? 

    My extremely uneducated guess is that drum machines spreading in and beyond hip hop (plus freestyle and maybe disco) made production more accessible. Then sampling became expensive and production techniques complex so production among artists dropped. 

    Musicians became savvy to publishing rights and began pushing for their names to be added to song writing credits. 

    For both the internet made making music accessible to those without training or community. For example, I can make a song and post it on YouTube in 30 seconds. It would sound rubbish and embarrassing. It would still be accessible to billions. That was impossible before ~2000. 

    Thank anyone patient enough to read and doubly so answer. 

  10. All this is doing is showing a trend in how credit is assigned.

  11. This chart is useless and misleading. Pop music and Modern Country are almost exclusively written by professional song writers. The performer will will either make minimal changes to the song or pay more to get their name added to the songwriter list. Or pay a lot more to be principal songwriter.

    There are exceptional singer/songwriters who write their own music, but their careers tend to be short. Anyone who thinks Taylor Swift writes her own music doesn’t understand the industry.

Comments are closed.