Inside the Dirty Business of Hit Songwriting

[Michie]

Sixty-four years ago, as Elvis Presley’s career reached its supernova stage, the 21-year-old singer’s team hit on a strategy that enabled him to profit from songwriting without actually writing songs. His management and music publisher had added Presley’s name to the credits on a couple of his early hits, but the singer wasn’t comfortable with the practice and frequently told interviewers that he had “never written a song in my life.” Instead, as recounted in Peter Guralnick’s authoritative biography “Last Train to Memphis,” his team set up an arrangement whereby the King skipped the credit but received one-third of the songwriting royalties for each song he released, no matter who wrote it. (This arrangement was confirmed to Variety by an industry source familiar with the catalog.)


According to Dolly Parton, the policy not only was still in practice nearly two decades later, but the King’s ransom had gotten even bigger. Presley was going to record Parton’s 1974 hit “I Will Always Love You,” which is now one of the top-selling and most-performed songs of all time, largely thanks to Whitney Houston’s epochal 1992 cover.

Continued below.
Inside the Dirty Business of Hit Songwriting - Variety

 

[jayem]

An interesting anecdote about pop songwriting. This was a top 3 hit for The Beach Boys in 1963:

Compare that to the melody of this No. 2 Chuck Berry song from 1958:

The tunes are essentially the same. It's not clear if there was intentional plagiarism. It might have been coincidental that Brian Wilson came up with the same melody that Chuck Berry composed for his song 5 years earlier. (Although Brian later claimed the song was a tribute to Berry.) But Chuck's publisher sued The Beach Boys for copyright infringement. The case was settled out of court with Chuck Berry getting the composer credit, and 10% of the royalties.