14 MusicWeek 22.06.12
BUSINESSANALYSIS EUSONGWRITERS EDITORIAL
Music industry realises its own global village
BRITISH ACTS HAVE ENJOYED POCKETS of real success in the States over the past year as record-breaking Adele has been joined in the Billboard charts by the likes of One Direction, The Wanted and Calvin Harris. But, as pleasing as all this is, of far greater significance
is the creative shift that has been playing out behind the scenes with writers and producers from the UK and mainland Europe impacting the US market in a way that has not happened in years. In the case of those from the continent their influence on
the American music industry right now is unprecedented with writers and producers from Sweden, Norway, France and elsewhere regularly turning up on hits by some of the US’s biggest superstars. On this side of the pond we have long got used to
fluctuations in the success of UK recording artists in the States, with our fortunes seemingly dependent on the musical trends at any given time and the quality of British talent we have to export. However, what we are witnessing here appears not to be a trend but a wholescale shift in the way the business creatively now works. The good news from a British perspective is that our writers
and producers appear to be more than holding their own, from artists writing their own material like Adele to non-performing writer/producers such as Steve Mac, Wayne Hector and Fraser T Smith. But these individuals’ own success is occurring against a backdrop of the Anglo-American stranglehold on popular music now being over and in 2012 international hits can come from absolutely anywhere. In what truly reflects a worldwide music industry, it is now
more common than ever for multi-million-selling tracks to have been created in several countries or more. This may involve a series of writers, each contributing a different skill to the work, which is then carefully built and woven together. Quite often it is writers and producers from outside the
UK and US supplying these skills, reflected by many of the world’s most successful writers and producers now hailing from somewhere on the European continent. That would have been unthinkable a few years ago, at a time when the UK would annually condescendingly snigger at mainland countries’ pop efforts at Eurovision when we were supposedly so superior. To the purists the modern approach in creating hits may sit
uncomfortably with sometimes half a dozen or more writers all working on one track, often physically apart and in different countries. It all flies in the face of the tradition of the individual singer-songwriter coming up with a tune or the established songwriting team, but it clearly gets results. But the “old-fashioned” method still gets a look-on,
witnessed by Ed Sheeran who, at a time when a number of the biggest hits in the States are the results of committees of writers and producers, was set to debut in the US Top 10 this week with an album of songs as back to basic as you can get. Paul Williams, Head of Business Analysis
Do you have views on this column? Feel free to comment by emailing
paul.williams@intentmedia.co.uk
www.musicweek.com
EURO INVASION SIGNALS A NEW CONTINENTAL SHIFTINTHE US
ABOVE British success: Calvin Harris is the only person to have written solely two of the US’s 40 biggest downloads of the year
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
More than half of 40 biggest-selling downloads in US this year include writing credits by UK or European songwriters
British writers Adele, Ed Drewett (left), Wayne Hector, Steve Mac and Fraser T Smith figure among Top 10 US downloads of year to date, while half of Top 10 co-penned by Swedes Songwriters from Denmark, France and Norway all represented in 2012’s Top 40 one- track downloads in States
Calvin Harris only person to have written solely two of the US’s 40 biggest downloads of the year
INTERNATIONAL BY PAUL WILLIAMS
E
urope’s songwriters and producers are rolling out their own type of single currency across the Atlantic with a full-scale invasion of
Billboard’s Hot 100 chart. Not since the second Brit Invasion of the 1980s
has the main singles countdown in the States been so accommodating to UK and European writers and producers with half of Nielsen SoundScan’s 40 biggest-selling downloads of the year so far carrying at least some creative input from the other side of the pond. However, what totally differs from when the
likes of Culture Club, Duran Duran and Wham! were ruling the Hot 100 three decades ago is this
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