The Song Machine Inside The Hit Factory

"An utterly satisfying examination of the business of popular music." —Nathaniel Rich, The Atlantic There’s a reason today’s ubiquitous pop hits are so hard to ignore—they’re designed that way. The Song Machine goes behind the scenes to offer an insider’s look at the global hit factories manufacturing the songs that have everyone hooked. Full of vivid, unexpected characters—alongside industry heavy-hitters like Katy Perry, Rihanna, Max Martin, and Ester Dean—this fascinating journey into the strange world of pop music reveals how a new approach to crafting smash hits is transforming marketing, technology, and even listeners’ brains. You’ll never think about music the same way again. A Wall Street Journal Best Business Book

"How do you make a song a global smash hit that is guaranteed to make $millions? Who are the hit-manufacturers that can create a tune that is so catchy, so wildly addictive, that it sticks in the minds of millions of listeners? And who are the powerful few that have the capacity to transform, say, a young Barbadian woman called Robyn Rihanna Fenty into the global megastar that is Rihanna? In The Song Machine, John Seabrook dissects the workings of this machine, travelling the world to reveal its hidden formulas, and interview its geniuses - 'the hitmakers' - at the centre of it all. Hilarious and jaw-droppingly shocking, this book will change how you think and feel about music, as well as how you listen to it."

After discovering a derelict record plant on the edge of a northern English city, and hearing that it was once visited by David Bowie, Karl Whitney embarks upon a journey to explore the industrial cities of British pop music. Manchester, Liverpool, Newcastle, Leeds, Sheffield, Hull, Glasgow, Belfast, Birmingham, Coventry, Bristol: at various points in the past these cities have all had distinctive and highly identifiable sounds. But how did this happen? What circumstances enabled those sounds to emerge? How did each particular city - its history, its physical form, its accent - influence its music? How were these cities and their music different from each other? And what did they have in common? Hit Factories tells the story of British pop through the cities that shaped it, tracking down the places where music was performed, recorded and sold, and the people - the performers, entrepreneurs, songwriters, producers and fans - who made it all happen. From the venues and recording studios that occupied disused cinemas, churches and abandoned factories to the terraced houses and back rooms of pubs where bands first rehearsed, the terrain of British pop can be retraced with a map in hand and a head filled with music and its many myths.

For the first time, Appetite for Self-Destruction recounts the epic story of the precipitous rise and fall of the modern recording industry, from an author who has been writing about it for more than ten years. With unparalleled access to those intimately involved in the music world’s highs and lows—including Warner Music chairman Edgar Bronfman Jr., renegade Napster creator Shawn Fanning, and more than 200 others—Steve Knopper is the first to offer such a detailed and sweeping contemporary history of the industry’s wild ride through the past three decades. From the birth of the compact disc, the explosion of CD sales, and the emergence of MP3-sharing websites that led to iTunes, to the current collapse of the industry as CD sales plummet, Knopper takes us inside the boardrooms, recording studios, private estates, garage computer labs, company jets, corporate infighting, and secret deals of the big names and behind-the-scenes players who made it all happen. Just as the incredible success of the CD turned the music business into one of the most glamorous, high-profile industries in the world, the advent of file sharing brought it to its knees, and Knopper saw it all.

An expansive and insightful exploration of one of the most iconic and electrifying artists ever, this book reveals the stunning, multi-generational influence and appeal of Prince and his revered music—from celebrated journalist, author, and host of the popular podcast The Touré Show. Infused with Touré’s unique pop-culture fluency, I Would Die 4 U is as passionate and radical as its subject matter. Building on his lifelong admiration for Prince’s oeuvre and interviews with those closest to the late artist, including band members, his tour manager, and music and Bible scholars, Touré deconstructs the life and work of the enigmatic icon who has been both a reflective mirror of and inspirational force for America. By defying traditional categories of race, gender, and sexuality, but also presenting a very conventional conception of religion and God, Prince was a man of profound contradictions. He spoke in the language of 60s pop and soul to a generation fearing Cold War apocalypse and the crack and AIDS epidemic, while simultaneously being both an MTV megastar and a religious evangelist. He creatively blended his songs with images of sex and profanity to invite us into a musical conversation about the healing power of God and religion. By demystifying Prince as a man, an artist, and a cultural force, I Would Die 4 U shows us how he impacted and defined a generation.

Essays explore inspiration and entrepreneurship in everyday Americans, including the story of Bob Kearns, who invented the intermittent windshield wiper.

Copiously researched and documented, Hit Men is the highly controversial portrait of the pop music industry in all its wild, ruthless glory: the insatiable greed and ambition; the enormous egos; the fierce struggles for profits and power; the vendettas, rivalries, shakedowns, and payoffs. Chronicling the evolution of America's largest music labels from the Tin Pan Alley days to the present day, Fredric Dannen examines in depth the often venal, sometimes illegal dealings among the assorted hustlers and kingpins who rule over this multi-billion-dollar business. Updated with a new last chapter by the author.

The Song Machine: Inside the Hit Factory by John Seabrook | Summary and AnalysisBook Preview: "Hook - First Verse - Chorus - Second Verse - Chorus - Bridge - Chorus - Outro." Cleverly laid out as the chapters in John Seabrook's newest title is the algorithm for the "hit track." The Song Machine: Inside the Hit Factory is all about the hit track: Who writes them, how they are made, their emergence into mainstream culture and their relevance in today's society.In the First Verse, John Seabrook illuminates the history of pop and profiles Swedish producers, the late Mr. Pop, and his protégé, Max Martin. These two songwriter/producers transformed pop music into what we hear on the radio today with acts such as Ace of Base, the Backstreet Boys, and Britney Spears.This is a summary and analysis of the book and NOT the original book This Book Contains: * Summary Of The Entire Book * Chapter By Chapter Breakdown * Analysis Of The Reading Experience Download Your Copy Today

An innovative investigation of the inner workings of Spotify that traces the transformation of audio files into streamed experience. Spotify provides a streaming service that has been welcomed as disrupting the world of music. Yet such disruption always comes at a price. Spotify Teardown contests the tired claim that digital culture thrives on disruption. Borrowing the notion of “teardown” from reverse-engineering processes, in this book a team of five researchers have playfully disassembled Spotify's product and the way it is commonly understood. Spotify has been hailed as the solution to illicit downloading, but it began as a partly illicit enterprise that grew out of the Swedish file-sharing community. Spotify was originally praised as an innovative digital platform but increasingly resembles a media company in need of regulation, raising questions about the ways in which such cultural content as songs, books, and films are now typically made available online. Spotify Teardown combines interviews, participant observations, and other analyses of Spotify's “front end” with experimental, covert investigations of its “back end.” The authors engaged in a series of interventions, which include establishing a record label for research purposes, intercepting network traffic with packet sniffers, and web-scraping corporate materials. The authors' innovative digital methods earned them a stern letter from Spotify accusing them of violating its terms of use; the company later threatened their research funding. Thus, the book itself became an intervention into the ethics and legal frameworks of corporate behavior.

How do we create new ways of looking at the world? Join award-winning data storyteller RJ Andrews as he pushes beyond the usual how-to, and takes you on an adventure into the rich art of informing. Creating Info We Trust is a craft that puts the world into forms that are strong and true. It begins with maps, diagrams, and charts — but must push further than dry defaults to be truly effective. How do we attract attention? How can we offer audiences valuable experiences worth their time? How can we help people access complexity? Dark and mysterious, but full of potential, data is the raw material from which new understanding can emerge. Become a hero of the information age as you learn how to dip into the chaos of data and emerge with new understanding that can entertain, improve, and inspire. Whether you call the craft data storytelling, data visualization, data journalism, dashboard design, or infographic creation — what matters is that you are courageously confronting the chaos of it all in order to improve how people see the world. Info We Trust is written for everyone who straddles the domains of data and people: data visualization professionals, analysts, and all who are enthusiastic for seeing the world in new ways. This book draws from the entirety of human experience, quantitative and poetic. It teaches advanced techniques, such as visual metaphor and data transformations, in order to create more human presentations of data. It also shows how we can learn from print advertising, engineering, museum curation, and mythology archetypes. This human-centered approach works with machines to design information for people. Advance your understanding beyond by learning from a broad tradition of putting things “in formation” to create new and wonderful ways of opening our eyes to the world. Info We Trust takes a thoroughly original point of attack on the art of informing. It builds on decades of best practices and adds the creative enthusiasm of a world-class data storyteller. Info We Trust is lavishly illustrated with hundreds of original compositions designed to illuminate the craft, delight the reader, and inspire a generation of data storytellers.