[klodolph]

The way that these laboratories work—most pop songs are made through collaboration, with a mixture of people working on it that are all really good at some part of songwriting, performance, or production.

You probably have at least two writers—maybe one person who’s really good at beats and arrangement, and one person who’s really good at topline. You have a producer, who gets good recordings of all of the parts and creates a mixdown. You have session musicians, who have dedicated their lives to an instrument.

It’s great watching interviews with the people involved with this process. The best songs often have serendipitous beginnings—somebody made a beat, and somebody else says “that would go well with these lyrics I’ve been working on”. Or something like that.

It’s a lot less factory-like than one might think. If you want to see factory-like music production, travel back to the 20th century, there was a lot of it. Look at the Brill Building, or Motown, for example.