12 Music Week 10.08.12
BUSINESSANALYSISSONGWRITERS IN Q2 EDITORIAL
Guitar groups needn’t fret after solid showing in Q2
ONCE UPON A TIME guitar bands did not automatically mean rock. Large parts of the second Brit Invasion of the 1980s were built on pop groups with guitars with the likes of Duran Duran, Culture Club and Spandau Ballet all fitting the bill. And they wrote their own material. So it is something of a throwback to see New York City’s Fun at
the top of Music Week’s exclusive songwriters chart for Q2. Although We Are Young is deemed alternative rock, it is in essence a great pop song played by a band with guitars and penned, like most of its parent album, by the group themselves with producer Jeff Bhasker. The fact this track topped the UK singles chart is an extremely
rare occurrence for a band like this. Before 2012 arrived, just one other guitar group had reached number one with a self-penned tune this decade – Scouting For Girls with This Ain’t A Love Song in 2010 – but this year alone we have had Coldplay (Paradise) and Fun reaching the summit while fellow US guitar pop band Maroon 5’s frontman Adam Levine was part of the writing team of his group’s recent chart- topper Payphone. These number ones
“The fact Fun’s We Are Young topped the UK singles chart is a rare occurance for a band like this. Before 2012 arrived, just one other guitar group had reached number one with a self-penned tune this decade - Scouting For Girls with This Ain’t A Love Song.”
have come in a year when more alternative creations by Gotye and Florence + The Machine have reached the top, while even a song co-written by Andrew Lloyd Webber has made it all the way, adding up to the most musically diverse range of
chart-toppers in a very long while. Guitar’s singles chart comeback via the pop route has also included Drive By from Train. The US act were once considered a rock band, especially with fare like Drops Of Jupiter (Tell Me), but have veered increasingly towards pop more recently following the arrival on the scene of Norwegian songwriting and production duo Espionage. They co-penned with frontman Patrick Monahan Hey, Soul Sister, which put the band back on the map commercially after years in the wilderness, and did the same with Drive By. A more pop stance has also been behind the incredible chart
revival of Maroon 5 whose change of musical tact from Moves Like Jagger onwards has resulted in the kind of sales the band have not enjoyed in years. Like Train, they have not been afraid of bringing in outside writers to deliver. While their less pop-based first three albums were either totally or mainly written within the band unit, their 2012 fourth set Overexposed followed the example of the Jagger smash by deploying a number of outside contributors, including pop kings Max Martin and Ryan Tedder. The result is their most successful album in years on both
sides of the Atlantic and it stands as another example of that magic mix of guitar bands and pop, once a vital component of the charts and evidence it can be again. Paul Williams, Head of Business Analysis
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paul.williams@intentmedia.co.uk
SONGWRITERS BY PAUL WILLIAMS
F
un have scored a rare victory for guitar music on Music Week’s songwriters chart in Q2 after holding off stiff competition from Calvin Harris and Carly
Rae Jepsen. The Warner/Chappell signings head the
countdown, based on songwriting shares of the UK’s Top 100 selling downloads of the period, thanks solely to their mega-hit We Are Young, which they penned with its Sony/ATV-published producer Jeff Bhasker. A slow-burner initially with just 40 copies sold
during its first week on sale in the UK last September, the track finally exploded in April and went on to sell 669,623 units in the quarter. That put it second on the Official Charts Company’s quarterly rankings, while the band’s writing contribution to the song is enough for them to narrowly finish ahead of Calvin Harris as the period’s most successful hit songwriters. The New York City band’s place at the top of the
songwriting league table is an exceptional one for a guitar band at a time when most of the biggest-selling one-track downloads are pop, urban or dance tracks. Providing them with some musical support in the top five are Universal Publishing’s Coldplay who finish in fifth place for a second successive quarter with their Rihanna duet Princess Of China, Paradise and Charlie Brown all among the quarter’s Top 100 sellers. In second place, 2011’s overall top hit songwriter
Calvin Harris scored his fourth number one in the quarter as a songwriter with Call My Name by Cheryl Cole debuting at the top with a new 2012 weekly high of 152,001 sales. It finished as the 11th top seller of the seller, while the EMI Publishing songwriter was also represented by two Rihanna hits: his co-penned Where Have You Been in 12th place and sole authored We Found Love in 72nd position. Harris’s own hit Let’s Go, co-penned with its featured vocalist Ne-Yo, was
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FUN AND CALVIN HARRIS ON SONG
Rae Jepsen also shines in the industry’s second quarter
15th and helps the Imagem-signed US R&B star to 30th position on the songwriters chart. Carly Rae Jepsen and Joshua Ramsay share third
place as the main writers of the former Canadian Idol finalist’s Call Me Maybe, the quarter’s top download seller with 845,938 copies sold. The song’s other writer Tavish Crowe is 48th with all three authors currently without a UK publishing deal. Once part of US band Orson, George Astasio and
Jason Pebworth with one-time Xenomania member Jonathan Shave move into the Top 10 of the songwriters chart as collective The Invisible Men, having been placed 11th last time. The Universal and Sony/ATV trio’s successes in Q2 included co-writing Laserlight, their third hit single with Jessie J following Do It Like A Dude and Who’s Laughing Now, and Conor Maynard’s breakthrough hit Can’t Say No. Hackney foursome Rudimental scored the 10th
biggest single of Q2 with Feel The Love and this takes the Sony/ATV signings to seventh place on the songwriting countdown. US band Train opened their UK chart account back
in 2001, but in this past quarter enjoyed their most widespread success yet with three tracks simultaneously charting. All co-penned by frontman Patrick Monahan, they were led by new hit Drive By, the quarter’s eighth biggest single, but also took in 2009 track Hey, Soul Sister and their 2001 breakthrough Drops Of Jupiter (Tell Me) in 76th and 86th places respectively. These take Monahan to eighth on the songwriters chart, while his EMI colleagues, New York-based Norwegian songwriting and production team Espionage, are 13th having written with him Drive By and Hey, Soul Sister. In Q1 Kobalt’s Dr Luke claimed co-authorship of
an unrivalled six of the period’s Top 100 downloads and he went one better the following quarter with his spread of seven comprising Rihanna’s Where Have You Been, Part Of Me and Wide Awake for Katy Perry, Jessie J hits Domino and Price Tag, Primadonna for
A PLUS POINT FOR SHEERAN ED PIPS ADELE, KEANE AND COLDPLAY TO This was also true of Keane who were the sole
ED SHEERAN finally saw off Adele to finish as top albums songwriter in Q2 as the 21 star plummeted to eighth place on Music Week’s rankings. Although Adele’s second album registered yet
again as the quarter’s top seller, its lowest quarterly sales yet (184,097) were not enough to prevent the likes of Sheeran, Keane and Coldplay overtaking her on the albums songwriters countdown- compiled from writing shares of the quarter’s 20 biggest artist albums, according to Official Charts Company data. Runner-up in Q1, Sony/ATV’s Sheeran headed
the chart this time after his album + sold nearly 150,000 additional copies over the three months. This was less than Adele’s album sold, but in songwriting terms he benefited more as he had written a far bigger percentage of his album than Adele did of hers.
authors of their fourth full studio album and fifth UK chart-topper Strangeland, which takes them to second place on the albums countdown after it sold 110,270 copies by quarter’s end. Behind them, fellow Universal signings Coldplay retain their Q1 position of third as Mylo Xyloto shifted another 111,065 copies. Barry, Robin and Maurice Gibb occupy fourth
position following the death of Robin in May, prompting a sizable pick-up in sales of the Bee Gees’ back catalogue, especially their retrospective Number Ones. The trio, who are published by Universal and Warner/Chappell, narrowly outscore EMI’s Emeli Sande who ranks fifth for a second successive quarter because of her own album Our Version Of Events and contributing to Labrinth’s Electronic Earth. Sande’s main collaborator, Sony/ATV-signed
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