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22.06.12 MusicWeek 15
The Billboard chart has witnessed foreign incursion before – not least the much-trumpeted Brit Invasion of the Eighties. Now a host of European songwriters and producers are doing the same as multi-national talent makes a big impact in the US
ANALYSIS OF THE TOP DOWNLOAD SELLERS Source: Nielsen SoundScan/Music Week research Gotye
THE GLOBAL HOT 100 TO 23.06.12 POS ARTIST/ TITLE / LABEL / WRITING NATIONALITY OF TRACK
1 GOTYE FEAT. KIMBRA Somebody That I Used To Know
Samples ‘n’ Sounds/Universal BELGIAN-AUSTRALIAN, BRAZILIAN 2 FUN. FEAT. JANELLE MONAE We Are Young
Fueled By Ramen US 3 CARLY RAE JEPSEN Call Me Maybe Schoolboy/Interscope CANADIAN
4 KELLY CLARKSON Stronger (What Doesn’t Kill You) 5 NICKI MINAJ Starships Young Money/Cash Money 6 ONE DIRECTION What Makes You Beautiful 7 FLO RIDA FEAT. SIA Wild Ones 8 THE WANTED Glad You Came 9 ADELE Set Fire To The Rain
RCA UK/US/SWEDISH TRINIDADIAN-US, MOROCCAN-SWEDISH, UK, SWEDISH Columbia SWEDISH, US Poe Ray Entertainment/Atlantic US, SWEDISH, AUSTRALIAN, FRENCH Mercury UK XL/Columbia UK 10 MAROON 5 FEAT. WIZ KHALIFA Payphone A&M/Octone US, SWEDISH
US SONGWRITERS are increasingly having to take a back seat in their own country’s singles market with overseas writers featuring on nine of the 10 biggest one- track downloads this year. Leading the way is Gotye featuring
Sia’s Somebody That I Used to Know, which is co-credited to the Belgian- Australian and the late Brazilian guitarist/composer Luiz Bonfá thanks to a sample and is the US’s top singles seller of the year so far with around 5 million units sold, according to Nielsen Soundscan. Kobalt-signed Gotye is joined in the
ABOVE Flying their flags: The multi-national invasion includes Dane Soulshock, Frenchman David Guetta and Australian Sia Furler
latest invasion is a multi-national one, taking in writers and producers not just from Britain but from across the continent, too. And in a further change to the assault of the 1980s, when artists more typically wrote their own material, the current chart takeover has largely been achieved with songs either not written by the acts themselves or penned with the assistance of other writers. Representing the Hot 100’s very own version of
Eurovision, the top end of the chart just this year has featured not only a number of British songwriters, among them Adele, Wayne Hector, Steve Mac and Fraser T Smith, but also writers from countries such as Sweden (including Max Martin, Carl Falk and Rami Yacoub), France (David Guetta among them), Norway (including Amund Bjorkland and Espionage) and Denmark (Soulshock). And further flying the flag for non-US talent are Belgian-Australian Gotye and Aussie Sia Furler, co-writer of tracks such as Flo Rida’s Wild Ones. “The situation for European writers and UK
writers has never been as good here as it is now,” says New York-based Brit Tim Blacksmith, co- manager of Norwegian songwriters and producers Stargate whose relocation to the US in 2005 helped to further open the door for other continental writers as they showed the way by delivering a series of mega-hits for US-signed superstars such as
year-to-date Top 10 by a number of other non-American songwriters with the fun featuring Janelle Monae smash We Are Young uniquely the only track among 2012’s very top sellers to have been written entirely by homegrown writers. Penned by the band and the track’s American producer Jeffrey Bhasker, it is the US market’s second biggest single of the year, having shifted around 4.8 million copies by last week. Although Carly Rae Jepsen’s Call Me
Maybe in third place was written by an all-Canadian team comprising Tavish Crowe, the track’s producer Josh Ramsay and Jepsen herself, the vast majority of the overseas writers in this Top 10 hail from the UK and Europe. British writers are strongly represented,
most expectedly on two of the three tracks recorded by UK artists. Universal Music Publishing’s Adele and Sony/ATV Fraser T Smith (signed to what is now BMG Chrysalis at the time) share the spoils on the XL signing’s Set Fire To The Rain, which has sold around 2.5m copies in the US this year and 3.9 million in total, while Peermusic’s Steve Mac and Warner/Chappell pair Wayne Hector and Ed Drewett co-penned The Wanted’s Stateside breakthrough Glad You Came. However, UK songwriters are also
enjoying Stateside success on hits by non- British artists with one-time Scritti Politti
keyboard player and BMG Chrysalis- signed David Gamson (left) one of the four writers of Kelly Clarkson’s 3
million US seller Stronger (What Doesn’t Kill You) and Hector making a second appearance in the year-so-far Top 10 on Nicki Minaj’s Starships. This he co-wrote with Moroccan-born Swede RedOne (Sony/ATV), Swedes Carl Falk (BMG Chrysalis) and Rami Yacoub (Kobalt), and Minaj (Universal) herself. Falk and Yacoub are also two of the
three writers of One Direction’s What Makes You Beautiful, which moved back into the top five of the Billboard Hot 100 last week, having now sold 2.6 million copies in the US. They are joined on the credits by EMI’s Swedish-based US writer Savan Kotecha with the track one of many examples among the year’s biggest sellers of how hits these days are frequently created by multi-national teams. Across Nielsen SoundScan’s 40
biggest-selling downloads in the US in the year to date just over half of them feature writers from the UK and Europe. Thirteen of the tracks include input from British songwriters, most of which were written or co-written by the recording artists themselves. These include four cuts from Adele, Coldplay’s Universal-published Paradise and Ellie Goulding’s Lights which, written by Global Talent’s Goulding and its two producers Richard Stannard (Sony/ATV) and Ash Howes (BMG Chrysalis), has now sold around 1.5 million copies in the US and has still to
peak on the Hot 100, having further climbed 14-13 last week. Sony/ATV’s Jessie J is represented by
her track Domino, which has sold 1.3m copies this year in the States, while EMI Publishing’s Calvin Harris is uniquely the only writer to have solely authored two of the year’s 40 biggest downloads in the States: We Found Love for Rihanna and his own fronted Feel So Close. Next to the Brits, Swedish writers are
the next most represented European nation and crop up on five of the year’s Top 10 through Stronger, Starships, What Makes You Beautiful, Flo Rida featuring Sia’s Wild Ones and Maroon 5 featuring Wiz Khalifa’s Payphone. This was co-penned by Kobalt-signed
Shellback who is co-writer and co-producer of Maroon 5 featuring Christina Aguilera’s Moves Like Jagger, which has sold an additional 1.1 million copies in the States this year, taking its cumulative US total beyond 5 million. The best-sellers list also includes
writers from France, Denmark and Norway, the latter taking in the EMI-published pair of Epsen Lind and Amund Bjørklund (below) who as Espionage co-wrote American rock band Train’s Drive By with lead singer Patrick Monahan. Espionage’s involvement in the track, which they also co-produced with Butch Walker, shows that it is not just in the more likely areas of pop, R&B, hip hop and dance that US artists and labels are turning to Europe for assistance but in other genres, too. However, one area where US
songwriters retain a tight grip on their own market is country. A handful of tracks from the genre, by acts including Luke Bryan, Eric Church and Carrie Underwood, have sold enough to be among the top sellers of the year and all of them were penned exclusively by Americans. However, as someone like Wayne
Hector has proved, having written for acts such as Rascal Flatts in the past, even Nashville is not immune to this great European influx.
Jessie J
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