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Artist News
83% of America’s biggest songs of the moment artist written
By CMU Editorial | Published on Tuesday 30 November 2010
This is interesting. Digital Music News has been reviewing the databases of US collecting societies ASCAP, BMI and SESAC and has concluded that 83% of current new songs have been in part written by the artist performing them.
Actually, that probably makes this research sound more in-depth than it possibly was – they checked out the songwriting credits for the 100 songs in BigChampagne’s most recent Ultimate Chart, which tracks all sorts of online airplay and exposure for tracks, I think. But either way, the quick survey confirms that in this day an age more artists than ever, including pop artists, are writing their own music.
Though DMN admit that some pop star’s songwriting credits appear as part of a team and therefore may well be more about getting a cut of valuable publishing royalties that actually having a huge amount of creative input in the making of the songs they sing, applying that famous pop star manta of “write a word, get a third [of the royalties]”.
