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The Song Machine: Inside the Hit Factory

Amazon.com Price:  $8.00 (as of 12/05/2019 16:53 PST- Details)

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Description

“An utterly satisfying examination of the business of popular music.” ―Nathaniel Rich, The Atlantic

Over the last two decades a new type of hit song has emerged, one that may be almost inescapably catchy. Pop songs have all the time had a “hook,” but today’s songs bristle with them: a hook each and every seven seconds is the rule. Painstakingly crafted to tweak the brain’s delight in melody, rhythm, and repetition, these songs are highly processed products. Like snack-food engineers, modern songwriters have discovered the musical “bliss point.” And just like junk food, the bliss point leaves you wanting more.

In The Song Machine, longtime New Yorker group of workers author John Seabrook tells the story of the massive cultural upheaval that produced these new, super-strength hits. Seabrook takes us into a unusual and surprising world, full of unexpected and vivid characters, as he traces the growth of this new approach to hit-making from its obscure origins in early 1990s Sweden to its dominance of today’s Billboard charts.

Journeying from New York to Los Angeles, Stockholm to Korea, Seabrook visits specialized teams composing songs in digital labs with new “track-and-hook” techniques. The stories of artists like Katy Perry, Britney Spears, and Rihanna, in addition to expert songsmiths like Max Martin, Stargate, Ester Dean, and Dr. Luke, The Song Machine shows what life is like in an industry that has been catastrophically disrupted―spurring innovation, competition, intense greed, and seductive new products.

Going beyond music to speak about money, business, marketing, and technology, The Song Machine explores what the new hits is also doing to our brains and listening habits, especially as services and products like Spotify and Apple Music use streaming data to gather music into new genres invented by algorithms based on listener behavior.

Fascinating, revelatory, and original, The Song Machine will change the way you listen to music.

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