charts discussion All Time Hot 100 Songwriters

[1989]

Fallin’, If I Ain’t Got You, and No One were massive, and she got the solo credit on two of them so this makes sense. 

[Ash12345]

92. Alicia Dean (Alicia Keys)

Points: 17,010

 

 

A classically trained pianist, Alicia Keys released her debut album "Songs In A Minor" in 2001, and lead single "Fallin" went #1, spending six weeks there and helping her get her first five Grammys including SOTY the following year. She continued to have significant success and huge hits in the decade that followed with songs like "Empire State of Mind", "If I Ain't Go You", "My Boo" and "No One".

 

Most streamed hits on Spotify

 

391m - If I Ain't Got You (Alicia Keys)

329m - No One (Alicia Keys)

239m - My Boo (Alicia Keys, Usher)

218m - Girl On Fire (Alicia Keys)

208m - Fallin' (Alicia Keys)

 

 

Table of Points

 

 

 

[cuneytb]

Wow Alicia  

 

:clap3: 

[Ash12345]

Reposted Alicia Keys' post because it was too late to edit some typos.

[Ash12345]

13 hours ago, kibo said:

do we actually expect the girlies to make the list?  

Does Alicia Keys count as a girlie or a lady?

[kibo]

Alicia Keys oh wow  yap, taylor is definitely in. 

[Cockney Cupcake]

I don’t expect Adele to be too high on this one cause she has very few entries/singles in comparison to others. Her fault so  

[Mr. Duff]

Alicia Keys solo on Fallin' and If I Ain't Got You  

[Mr. Duff]

Could you kindly add me to tag list so I can follow this thread? Thank you!

[suburbannature]

5 hours ago, vamp said:

Taylor or Adele will be #1.

It will be one of Max Martin, Stevie Wonder, Paul McCartney, etc

[Squall]

It doesn't really make sense to divide credits by the number of people involved though. For instance, Taylor & Imogen Heap are both credited on Clean but Taylor definitely contributed more than 50% to it. The opposite is true as well with artists like Beyoncé or Rihanna.

 

Anyway, great job  

[Cherry123]

3 minutes ago, Squall said:

It doesn't really make sense to divide credits by the number of people involved though. For instance, Taylor & Imogen Heap are both credited on Clean but Taylor definitely contributed more than 50% to it. The opposite is true as well with artists like Beyoncé or Rihanna.

There is no way to tell the contribution in every song. The thread is great.

 

Didnt expect Alicia to make it. She really did that with Fallin 

[Squall]

13 minutes ago, Cherry123 said:

There is no way to tell the contribution in every song. The thread is great.

 

Didnt expect Alicia to make it. She really did that with Fallin 

I didn't say otherwise though  

 

I'm just saying it won't be 100% accurate, which is fine anyway since there's no another way to measure it

Edited December 11, 2019 by Squall

[Squall]

Not sure why my post isn't appearing but well, ok  

[Soda Pop Queen]

Interesting list and you've obviously also done a bit of education on each songwriter. I'll follow this just for the sheer amount of work you put in because this probably took weeks to research and compile

[dabunique]

21 hours ago, Fitzswiftie said:

Oh ****, can’t believe I forgot about her

da nerve of u lol

 

it happens, but yes we should expect all three of those

[DemDam92]

@Ash12345

Damn so much work, looks festive! Thanks!

[trainsskyscrapers]

1 hour ago, Squall said:

It doesn't really make sense to divide credits by the number of people involved though. For instance, Taylor & Imogen Heap are both credited on Clean but Taylor definitely contributed more than 50% to it. The opposite is true as well with artists like Beyoncé or Rihanna.

 

Anyway, great job  

Lol IIRC, the OP looks at the percentage splits on ASCAP and other music registration bodies. If those splits are FACT, TSwift and you have 0 to worry about. 

[Squall]

56 minutes ago, trainsskyscrapers said:

Lol IIRC, the OP looks at the percentage splits on ASCAP and other music registration bodies. If those splits are FACT, TSwift and you have 0 to worry about. 

What's the difference on this site?

[Mr. Wonder]

15 hours ago, Fitzswiftie said:

Also thinking the way about Prince. 99% of his material is all solo written, he’s solo written big hits for The Bangles, Chaka Khan and Sinead O Connor and has a couple rap samples to maybe put him over the edge. 

Prince has like 20 top ten hits. I expect him to be top 10. And now that I think, Max Martin will probably be #1. 

[family.guy123]

I’m excited for Dolly. Pretty sure IWALY alone would get her in the top 100.

[Ash12345]

3 hours ago, trainsskyscrapers said:

Lol IIRC, the OP looks at the percentage splits on ASCAP and other music registration bodies. If those splits are FACT, TSwift and you have 0 to worry about. 

I use ASCAP/BMI to see how many writers are officially credited since they're a more reliable source than wikipedia or genius. Those organizations do know the percentage splits but they're not really public unfortunately, so I'm still doing the calculations by splitting the points equally among all co-writers.

 

The ownership shares are still not necessarily perfectly representative of how much each person contributed. It could also be a reflection of the co-writer's bargaining power, and often probably something that was agreed upon before the collaborators entered the writing session. In Taylor's case, maybe sometimes she's just generous with ownership shares to be supportive of other songwriters and is willing to split ownership 50/50 even if she contributed more than 50%. 

 

Sometimes you can still figure out what the ownership share is though, because ASCAP and BMI will still make the ownership share for their writers public. Jack Antonoff, Liz Rose and Taylor Swift are all with BMI, so it'll just say 100% owned by BMI and you can't figure out how much each of them owns. However, you can figure out the ownership shares when the songwriters are registered with different organizations.

 

In these cases it seems to be evenly split

Swift, Martin & Shellback songs - Taylor owns 33.3%

Swift, Petraglia & Orrall songs - Taylor owns 33.3%

Swift & Orrall songs - Taylor owns 50%

Swift & Tedder songs - Taylor owns 50%

Swift & Wilson snogs - Taylor owns 50%

All You Had To Do Was Stay - Taylor owns 50%

Clean - Taylor owns 50%

You'll Always Find Your Way Back Home - Taylor owns 50%

Fearless - Swift/Rose own 66.7% while Hillary Lindsey owns 33.3%

The Way I Loved You - Taylor owns 50%

This Is What You Came For - Taylor owns 50%

Style - Taylor owns 25%

So It Goes... - Taylor owns 25%

A Perfectly Good Heart - Taylor and Troy Verges own 66.7%, Brett James owns 33.3%

Mary's Song - Taylor and Liz Rose own 66.7%, Brian Maher owns 33.3%

If This Was A Movie - Taylor owns 50%

Dancing With Our Hands Tied - Taylor owns 25%

Best Days of Your Life - Taylor owns 50%

 

Uneven splits

Cruel Summer - Annie Clark (St. Vincent) only owns 10% so her contribution was probably relatively minor compared to Taylor and Jack who own the remaining 90%

Untouchable - the original version was written by the band's Barlowe brothers (SESAC) and Tommy Lee James (BMI), but it seems like Nathan Barlowe was with BMI before switching to SESAC. However with the original, ASCAP's website says they own 40% while BMI says they own 60%? So maybe the SESAC rights got sold to ASCAP or something, I'm not sure how that would work. With Taylor Swift's version, the ASCAP share drops to 27.5% while BMI's share increases to 70% (which doesn't even add up to 100% anymore)... But the fact that BMI's share increase so much does suggest Taylor owns a decent chunk of the rights to her version of the song, maybe around 25%. She did re-arrange and tweak some of the lyrics and song structure and change a lot of the melodies. 

Two Is Better Than One - Taylor only ones 25%, not too surprising since she was just the featuring artist. Martin Johnson from Girls Like Boys owns 75%.

ME! - Brendon Urie only owns 20%, Taylor/Joel did say that they worked on it just the two of them first and only brought Brendon in to work on it at the end so it makes sense that his contributions weren't as big

Ready For It - Taylor owns 29% which is more than the 25% you'd expect with four writers, so maybe Ali Payami's contribution was relatively small?

I Forgot That You Existed - Taylor & Frank Dukes own 75% while Louis Bell owns only 25%

It's Nice To Have A Friend - Taylor & Frank Dukes own 75% while Louis Bell owns only 25%

Afterglow - this song actually has 4 co-writers according to BMI and ASCAP, unlike what wikipedia and Spotify's credits say. Mathew Tavares seems to have a written credit for doing some guitar on the song. Taylor, Dukes and Tavares own 77.5% while Louis Bell owns only 22.5%.

London Boy - Taylor, Jack and Sounwave own 70% while Cautious Clay owns 30% for the sample of his music

End Game - Taylor, Ed and Future are represented by BMI and only own 57.5% compared to 42.5% for Martin & Shellback so I'm guessing that's because Ed and Future got a smaller share due to being featured artists?

 

Anyways, it seems like in Taylor's case, the ownership does still get split pretty evenly in the end.

 

That's not true for other singers, Rihanna, Ariana and Selena all seem to get a smaller share of the songwriting ownership than their co-writers, for example Ariana gets 5% on her Pharrell co-writers for Sweetener while Pharrell gets 95%, and Selena only has 5% ownership on Good For You and 10% on It Ain't Me. For Beyonce it seems like she has an equal share some of the time, but a smaller than equal share other times.

Edited December 11, 2019 by Ash12345

[Ash12345]

91. Jerry Leiber

Points: 17,013

 

 

Jerry Leiber wrote most of his songs as part of a highly successful songwriting duo with Mike Stoller. Two Jewish boys growing up in Baltimore and Queens (respectively), they immersed themselves in black culture and its music. Their families both moved to Los Angeles when they were teenagers, where they met and bonded over R&B/Blues. Their first hits were written for black singers, including "Hound Dog" for Big Mama Thornton, which was their first #1 on the R&B charts in 1953, and became an even bigger hit when Elvis Presley covered it in 1956. That led to them working with Elvis directly, writing several more huge hits for him, including pre-Hot 100 hits "Don't", "Loving You" and "Jailhouse Rock". In addition to writing together, they also produced their songs and founded Sparks Records in 1953 and Red Bird Records with George Goldner in 1964. Their 50s and 60s hits brought them success in later decades too, "I Keep Forgettin" was a #55 hit in 1962 when it was recorded by Chuck Jackson, became a #4 hit when Michael McDonald sample it on a song also called "I Keep Forgettin'" in 1982, and then that song got sampled on Warren G's #2 hit "Regulate" in 1994. "Stand By Me" was a #4 hit when Ben E King recorded it in 1961, had seven different covers chart over the decades that followed, and then got sampled in 2007's #1 hit Beautiful Girls by Sean Kingston.

 

Most streamed Hot 100 hits on Spotify

 

377m - Standy By Me (Ben E. King)

237m - Beautiful Girls (Sean Kingston)

208m - Regulate (Warren G)

28m - I Keep Forgettin' (Michael McDonald)

17m - Love Potion No. 9 (The Clovers)

 

 

Table of Points

 

 

@Green @Revenge @Witch Privilege @trainsskyscrapers @Insanity @Fitzswiftie  @Juanny @JawBreaker @alfonso12 @Weed @Nip Tuck @Cherry123 @eli's_rhythm @1DES @princedonte @Alpha Male @Timber @jordanjm @SoulKiwi@Ohno @Mezik@DougAF @Chainsmoker@suburbannature @Erotic@mcohen@ChatshireCat@cuneytb @Arxane @1989 @Mr. Duff

Edited December 11, 2019 by Ash12345

[SoulKiwi]

Loving the descriptions for each person so much  

[St. Charles]

Wow so one hit spawned a lot of smaller hits.