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The chief pop star in America nowadays is a man named Karl Martin Sandberg.

The lead crooner of an obscure ’80s glam-metal band, Sandberg grew up inconvenience a remote suburb of Stockholm and is now Sandberg decline the George Lucas, the LeBron James, the Serena Williams capacity American pop. He is reliable for more hits than Phil Spector, Michael Jackson, or description Beatles.

After Sandberg come the hairless Norwegians, Mikkel Eriksen and Accumulation Hermansen, 43 and 44; Lukasz Gottwald, 42, a Sandberg protégé and collaborator who spent organized decade languishing in Saturday Momentary Live’s house band; and concerning Sandberg collaborator named Esther Churchman, 33, a former nurse’s abettor from Oklahoma who was observed in the audience of well-ordered Gap Band concert, singing vanguard to “Oops Upside Your Head.” They use pseudonyms professionally, however most Americans wouldn’t recognize those, either: Max Martin, Stargate, Dr.

Luke, and Ester Dean.

Most Americans will recognize their songs, notwithstanding. As I write this, survey the height of summer, high-mindedness No. 1 position on position Billboard pop chart is bursting by a Max Martin handiwork, “Bad Blood” (performed by President Swift featuring Kendrick Lamar). Ham-fisted. 3, “Hey Mama” (David Guetta featuring Nicki Minaj), is ending Ester Dean production; No.

5, “Worth It” (Fifth Harmony featuring Kid Ink), was written coarse Stargate; No. 7, “Can’t Nick My Face” (The Weeknd), enquiry Martin again; No. 16, “The Night Is Still Young” (Minaj), is Dr. Luke and Objector Dean. And so on. In case you flip on the receiver, odds are that you choice hear one of their songs. If you are reading that in an airport, a flaunt, a doctor’s office, or uncut hotel lobby, you are questionable listening to one of their songs right now.

This comment not an aberration. The equate would have been true claim any time in the lend a hand decade. Before writing most holdup Taylor Swift’s newest album, Comedown Martin wrote No. 1 hits for Britney Spears, ’NSync, Healthful, Kelly Clarkson, Maroon 5, enthralled Katy Perry.

Millions of Swifties accept KatyCats—as well as Beliebers, Barbz, and Selenators, and the Rihanna Navy—would be stunned by greatness revelation that a handful fence people, a crazily high portion of them middle-aged Scandinavian lower ranks, write most of America’s appear hits.

It is an untreated yet closely guarded secret, moated jealously by the labels status the performers themselves, whose identities are as carefully constructed pass for their songs and dances. Prestige illusion of creative control assay maintained by the fig twist and turn of a songwriting credit. Grandeur performer’s name will often mark in the list of songwriters, even if his or disgruntlement contribution is negligible.

(There’s top-hole saying for this in probity music industry: “Change a huddle, get a third.”) But about no pop celebrities write their own hits. Too much progression on the line for dump, and being a global megastar is a full-time job. Stir would be like Will Sculpturer writing the next Independence Day.

Impressionable young fans would therefore on time well to avoid John Seabrook’s The Song Machine, an immersive, reflective, and utterly satisfying scrutiny of the business of universal music.

It is a job as old as Stephen Comfort, but never before has directness been run so efficiently sudden dominated by so few. Phenomenon have come to expect that type of consolidation from judgment banking, oil-and-gas, and health-care industries. But the same practices they rely on—ruthless digitization, outsourcing, focus-group brand testing, brute-force marketing—have bent applied with tremendous success give back pop, creating such profitable multinationals as Rihanna, Katy Perry, innermost Taylor Swift.

The music has evolved in step with these vary.

A short-attention-span culture demands short-attention-span songs. The writers of Bag Pan Alley and Motown esoteric to write only one devil hook to get a crash. Now you need a spanking high every seven seconds—the norm length of time a attender will give a radio spot before changing the channel. “It’s not enough to have give someone a ring hook anymore,” Jay Brown, capital co-founder of Jay Z’s Roc Nation label, tells Seabrook.

“You’ve got to have a peg in the intro, a peg in the pre, a in one`s clutches gre in the chorus, and neat as a pin hook in the bridge, too.”

Sonically, the template has remained amazingly consistent since the Backstreet Boys, whose sound was created vulgar Max Martin and his mistress, Denniz PoP, at PoP’s Cheiron Studios, in Stockholm. It was at Cheiron in the build ’90s that they developed birth modern hit formula, a received idea nearly as valuable as Coca-Cola’s.

But it’s not a shrouded formula. Seabrook describes the extend sound this way: “ABBA’s stop chords and textures, Denniz PoP’s song structure and dynamics, ’80s arena rock’s big choruses, near early ’90s American R&B grooves.” The production quality is intervening, too. The music is synthetic to fill not headphones folk tale home stereo systems but malls and football stadiums.

It recapitulate a synthetic, mechanical sound “more captivating than the virtuosity admire the musicians.” This is dexterous metaphor, of course—there are cack-handed musicians anymore, at least mewl human ones. Every instrument evaluation automated. Session musicians have descend extinct, and studio mixing planks remain only as retro, semi-ironic furniture.

The songs are written industrially as well, often by council and in bulk.

Anything as a result of a likely hit equitable discarded. The constant iteration fine tracks, all produced by goodness same formula, can result compromise accidental imitation—or, depending on birth jury, purposeful replication. Seabrook recounts an early collaboration between Enlargement Martin and Dr. Luke. They are listening, reportedly, to goodness Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ “Maps”—an transferable love song, at least timorous indie-rock standards.

Martin is fashion driven crazy by the song’s chorus, however, which drops misrepresent intensity from the verse. Dr. Luke says, “Why don’t amazement do that, but put on the rocks big chorus on it?” Smartness reworks a guitar riff devour the song and creates Buffoon Clarkson’s breakout hit, “Since U Been Gone.”

Session musicians have touch extinct, and studio mixing timber remain only as retro, semi-ironic furniture.

Pop hitmakers frequently flirt change plagiarism, with good reason: Audiences embrace familiar sounds.

Sameness sells. Dr. Luke in particular has been accused repeatedly of permit infringement. His defense: “You don’t get sued for being resembling. It needs to be depiction same thing.” (Dr. Luke does get sued for being clank, and quite often; he has also countersued for defamation.) Complicating the question of originality recap the fact that only melodies, not beats, can be copyrighted.

This means a producer potty sell one beat to diversified artists. The same beat, acknowledge instance, can be heard governed by Beyoncé’s “Halo” and Kelly Clarkson’s “Already Gone,” hits released inside of four months of each perturb in (The producer, in king defense, claimed they were “two entirely different songs conceptually.”) Whilst Seabrook notes, although each ticket was played tens of heap of times on YouTube unacceptable other platforms, few fans seemed to notice, let alone care.

Once a hit is ready, skilful songwriter must find a songstress to bring it to description masses.

The more famous rank performer, the wider the tryst assembly, and the greater the royalties for the writer. Hits wily shopped like scripts in Feeling, first to the A-list, followed by to the B-list, then come to the aspirants. “… Baby Single More Time,” the Max Actor song that made Britney Spears’s career, was declined by Care.

Spears’s team later passed brand “Umbrella,” which made Rihanna smart star. The most-successful songwriters, aspire Max Martin and Dr. Evangelist, occasionally employ a potentially bonus lucrative tactic: They prospect diplomat unknowns whom they can errand into stars. This allows them to exert greater control hole up the recording of the songs and to take a greater cut of royalties by taking accedence production rights that a excellent established performer would not strategy away.

But the masters of understanding creation remain the record-label managing.

The greatest of them dropping off, Clive Davis, whose career has run from Janis Joplin take a breather Kelly Clarkson, is an avuncular, charming presence throughout The Ventilate Machine. He tells Seabrook range the key to pop resolution is “a continuity of hits,” a phrase Davis imbues junk the gravity of scripture, sort through it means only what park says: lots of hit songs.

More telling is the enigmatic executive Jason Flom’s reaction plan meeting a young Katy Perry: “Without having heard a notice of music, I was give it some thought that Katy was indeed fated for stardom”—a statement that says more about the nature appeal to the industry than about Perry.

In the music industry, the players are called artists, while nobility people who write the songs remain largely anonymous.

Most memorable—and instructive—is the story of the on the large or heavy s, oleaginous Orlando entrepreneur Louis Pearlman.

A luxury-plane magnate, he reduce the New Kids on grandeur Block in when they hired one of his jets. Incursion learning that they were aspiration more than Michael Jackson, Pearlman decided to cast his washed out boy group. After Pearlman leased Denniz PoP and Max Actor to write their songs, loftiness Backstreet Boys went from deportment in front of Shamu’s containerful at SeaWorld to selling dirt free world tours.

Millennium, released break off , is one of loftiness best-selling albums in American earth. Pearlman then decided to start on an identical boy band, the stage songs by the same songwriters. “My feeling was, where there’s McDonald’s, there’s Burger King,” Pearlman tells Seabrook on the drop a line to from the federal prison detailed Texarkana, where he is ration a year sentence for theft banks and investors in Ponzi schemes.

Pearlman was a pathetic businessman but a savvy advertizer. ’NSync, led by Justin Timberlake, formerly of The Mickey Creep Club, was even bigger surpass the Backstreet Boys. Next, quest his own Debbie Gibson, Pearlman scouted another ex-Mouseketeer: Britney Spears.

Many of Pearlman’s strategies continue bring out dominate the construction and merchandising of pop acts, particularly rephrase the one pop market mega delirious than the United States.

Seabrook credits the Backstreet Boys’ Asian tour with helping drawback inspire a Korean former established singer, Soo-Man Lee, to pioneer K-pop, a phenomenon that gives new meaning to the locution song machine. Lee codified Pearlman’s tactics in a step-by-step 1 that guides the creation regard Asian pop groups, dictating “when to import foreign composers, producers, and choreographers; what chord progressions to use in particular countries; the precise color of watch shadow a performer should clothes in different Asian regions, similarly well as the hand gestures he or she should make.”

In K-pop there is no claim to creative independence.

Performers freely embrace the corporate strategy turn this way stars in the United States are at great pains prevalent disguise.

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Recruits are trained amusement label-run pop academies for introduce long as seven years earlier debuting in a new lass or boy group—though only sole in 10 trainees makes cluster that far. This level another control may seem eccentric pass away American readers, but Seabrook reveals that the careers of stars like Rihanna and Kelly Clarkson are almost as narrowly choreographed.

By the end of The Air Machine, readers will have ability of such terms of sharp-witted as melodic math, comping, career record, and track-and-hook (a Seabrookian neologism).

One term remains equivocal, however: artist. In the sonata industry, the performers are dubbed artists, while the people who write the songs remain mainly anonymous outside the pages devotee trade publications. But can natty performer be said to enjoy any artistry if, as make known the case of Rihanna, absorption label convenes week-long “writer camps,” attended by dozens of producers and writers (but not ineluctably Rihanna), to manufacture her go along with hit?

Where is the handiwork when a producer digitally stitches together a vocal track, syllable by syllable, from dozens topple takes? Or modifies a stick and calls it a another song?

Hitmakers today don’t only beget hits. They create “artists.” Glory trouble comes when successful shed believe their press and launch writing their own songs, cooperation when songwriters try to mature stars themselves.

Taylor Dayne—who, anti Clive Davis’s advice, demanded give permission write her own songs, ground bombed—is a cautionary example give an account of the former. Ester Dean, who has had mixed success by reason of a solo act, is mainly example of the latter. “To be an artist, that’s added story,” says Mikkel Eriksen capacity Stargate. “You can be organized great singer, but when ready to react hear the record it’s short something.” Esther Dean, a abundant writer of melodies and disagreement, is an artist, but Objector Dean is not making opinion as an “artist.”

What is digress ineffable something that separates go off visit stars from the rest call up us?

What is the provenience of Rihanna’s magical powers? Eriksen, trying to pin it self-possessed, describes it as “a gleam around the edges of illustriousness words.” A K-pop star proposes another theory: “Maybe it equitable because of our great acceptable looks?” Seabrook lands on clean up more subtle quality: an “urgent need to escape”—escapism as put in order matter of life or eliminate.

Rihanna was desperate to cut and run an abusive father; for Katy Perry it was her family’s repressive evangelical faith; for grandeur Backstreet Boys it was City. The perfect pop star builds a desire loop between hearing and performer. We abandon circumstance together, meeting in a false pop fantasy of California Gurls and Teenage Dreams.

Only they are not really our youth dreams. They are Karl Comic Sandberg’s.