Ivor Novello awards 2015: In the age of multiple credits, it's tricky to know who wrote what
The greatest pop hits have often been crafted by anonymous teams
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Your support makes all the difference.As the Olivier award-winning musical Beautiful attests, the greatest pop hits have often been crafted by anonymous songwriting teams huddled around a piano in a stuffy rehearsal room.
Carole King, who wrote timeless classics including “Will You Love Me Tomorrow?” with partner Gerry Goffin in New York, is one of the few back room operatives who made the transition to hit singer-songwriter.
Tin Pan Alley’s writers were driven out of business after the beat music boom by groups whose credibility rested on the performance of their own, often confessional songs – especially after discovering the lucrative publishing royalties they would otherwise be passing up.
But now pop has returned to the days of manufactured bands and singles which are scientifically crafted to appeal to radio programmers and Shazam-taggers, through variations on a narrow range of rhythmic and melodic motifs.
Swedish musician Max Martin has dominated pop for two decades, honing a homogenised, synth-led club sound. Last year alone he produced and co-wrote seven of the 13 tracks on Taylor Swift’s 1989, 10 of the 13 tracks on Katy Perry’s Prism and all of the biggest hits off Ariana Grande’s My Everything.
One Direction’s last presciently titled album Four was cobbled together from the work of 11 songwriters and nine producers. The boys themselves are also credited on a number of songs. Even Ed Sheeran’s x album is the result of multiple collaborations with writers including Pharrell Williams, ensuring that all popular musical bases are covered.
The Novellos is now restricting the total numbers of writers who claim credit for a song to six. Presenter Paul Gambaccini said: “There were so many songs where people were putting friends down who happened to be present for a cut. Do we really want someone with 1 per cent of a song getting an award? The Novellos don’t have an infinite number of statues.”
The Blurred Lines ruling, however, threatens to change the terms of songwriting trade. The family of Marvin Gaye were awarded £4.8m in damages after jurors decided that Pharrell Williams and Robin Thicke had breached the copyright of Gaye’s 1977 hit “Got To Give It Up”.
Thicke, who had joined in the £14m profit bonanza from the song, testified that he actually had very little to do with its creation.
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