> ...someone else actually makes it.

...which sort of applies to a lot of Hot 100 artists as well. A good songwriter writes it, a talented producer makes it sound good, and a well-known personality sings it (with varying accuracy) and has their name put on it as the "artist".

It's a spectrum. At one end you've got The Velvet Underground playing around a single mic hooked directly to a reel-to-reel, and at the other end you've got neural-net generated lofi hip hop beats to relax/study to. If you sort artists by play count on Spotify, the top results will be all over this spectrum (but mostly in the middle, I think).

I remember listening —really listening— to a Debbie Gibson song, in the early nineties.

She was never an artist I cared about. I just assumed she was a “teenybopper queen.”

The song clearly had one -maybe two- musicians in the background, playing a sampler, while she sang. Maybe she played the sampler.

I realized it probably cost almost nothing to record that song.

She didn’t have a regular band, and probably threw one together, when she toured.

I suspect that many artists do the same.

A lot of music these days is produced by one or two people with a computer sitting in a room by themselves. I sometimes listen to the Music Introducing programs on BBC Radio, especially BBC Music Introducing in London [1]. The music is submitted to the BBC by the musicians themselves—hundreds of tracks a week, apparently—and the DJs choose the songs to air on the program. Many of the songs, which are in a variety of genres, are created in the artists’ homes—hence the genre “bedroom pop” [2], which has been around for a while but seems to have taken off since COVID.

I’m an older guy with musical tastes formed in the 1970s, but I find a lot of this new independent music stimulating, enjoyable, and very competently made. When there’s a song I particularly like, I’ve sometimes looked up the artist online, and often he or she has had only a few hundred plays on YouTube and a few dozen followers on Instagram. It must be really tough for young musicians trying to make a career out of music now.

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p025tszp

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lo-fi_music

There are musicians for hire to play in studio and on the road. Very common practice.

Similarly is the Beach Boys where one brother never left the studio and wrote all of the music while the other guys learned to perform the tunes to take on the road.

Not quite the same, but in that world though

That's a huge number of artists. Take Britney Spears' Grammy winning Toxic for example. The song was written and produced by Bloodshy & Avant, with additional writing from Cathy Dennis and Henrik Jonback[1]. …Baby One More Time, another example of hers contains zero songs written by Spears. Is that the same kind of deception that an unknown artist makes when publishing an original song that makes it way onto a jazz playlist? It's hard to find the utility of such a distinction.

1. https://www.officialcharts.com/chart-news/britney-spears-tox...

I don't know how true this is but it's been widely reported that the lyric "hit me baby one more time" was due to the song's writer (who is Swedish) believing "hit" was American slang for "call."

It's plausible due to the idiom "hit me up" meaning "call me."

Why couldn't anyone on Spears' team come in and smooth out that idiosyncrasy? If someone writes gibberish for lyrics, do singers just go ahead and sing gibberish?

I don’t know if that story is true, but if it is the lyric still works even if it doesn’t match the songwriter’s intent.

There’s the other slang meaning as in, “I’d hit that”. Of course there is the darker physical hitting interpretation which advocates against domestic violence have a problem with.

Or it could be taken as a blackjack metaphor, for pushing one's luck just a little bit more.

If she had been older and had marketed herself differently, sure.

Benny Blanco produced (often also wrote or co-wrote) 29 number one songs for artists including Ed Sheeran, Justin Bieber, The Weeknd, Selena Gomez, Ariana Grande, Britney Spears, Lana Del Rey, Miguel, Halsey, and Camila Cabello.

How do you differentiate this sort of artists from 90+% of artists on the top 40? Isn't nearly the entirety of pop music built upon semi-fictional characters?

>They're just branding-icons

Honestly that seems like a lot of music since the 2000s. Grab a pretty face with a good body and an autotune.

Honestly, this seems like a lot of music since the 1950s. Grab a pretty face with a good body and a nice suit.

If you're going back to the fifties it was worse. It was common to have a model on the cover that is white when the artists are not just to sell albums to racists.

Milli Vanilli, Boney M. just to name two. This isn't a modern phenomenon.

It might not have been so easy to pull it off. Or maybe it was. It was the time before people played or sang live on TV. So there was less risk then in the years were live performance in a TV studio became somewhat of the norm.

And for generated music to be profitable it probably "just" needs to have a lot of songs one would not skip when they are part of some automatic play lists or "radio stations" playing stuff similar to x or y.

This way while any one song would only have few streams the overall oeuvre of the creator could be quite profitable. The same as with any auto-generated product targeting the long tail in Amazon (think T-shirts with quotes).

Like the Gorillaz?

Am I missing something?

This describes most of the music industry.