FROM time to time, I get about work as a ghost producer. For those unfamiliar with the term, ghosting means you do the work under someone else’s name. Because the world of consumerism sells brands, the person, thing, or concept that represents the brand does not necessarily have anything to do with the content that brand produces and sells. The public tends to assume the artist is primarily responsible for the art they produce, so it makes sense in this regard that fans of an artist might be upset to find out that their idol did not create the music they love — as opposed to, for example, finding out the artist did not create an associated fragrance. Everyone knows and accepts without issue that Rihanna likely had little to do with the production of “perfumes by Rihanna” — I'd be surprised if she's even smelled all of them, let alone had any direct involvement in their olfactive development.

When I first found out about ghost producing, having been presented with an opportunity to do it, I actually felt hurt and offended. There's a certain purposefulness to creating art often accompanied by a sense of ownership. If the ownership of that art gets misrepresented, it feels very much like a personal attack. But over time, with lots of exposure to the Los Angeles music industry, I've grown fairly accustomed to the idea of ghost work. For example, renowned producers, DJs, and even film composers typically have a team of people working to make their music. These staff are present in every studio session, and put lots of work in on their own. The boss oversees the operation, gets their name stamped on it, it sells like crazy, and everybody gets paid.

Humans have a very intimate relationship with art, especially music. You don't see people driving around with paintings in their cars to look at — we have radios, instant music gratification machines providing us with a quick fix to the stresses of daily life. Because of this intimate relationship with music, because we let it into the deepest parts of our hearts, because we readily welcome it into our most personal areas of life and let it do things to our most sensitive and vulnerable emotions, we might feel we deserve to know a thing or two about the artist who created these sounds in the first place. Therefore, an emotional attachment to particular music includes an emotional connection to its creator.

If we examine the things falling under the categories of entertainment or distraction with which we involve ourselves, we find that many of these products of consumption are in fact provided by corporations we know little to nothing about. Evaluating further, we'll even find evidence of our having been affected by the very commercials and various advertisements we've seen of that particular brand that we would otherwise have assumed immunity against. It's usually in no more detail than a sketch — a vague familiarity, a certain vibe, a subtle feeling — that's all it takes to get people confronted with a plethora of options across the shelves to make a quick‐thinking, almost instinctive decision about which of the otherwise identical brands to purchase. When you visit the sales-grounds of any brand business — Guitar Center, Burger King, American Apparel, even Disney Land — you never actually engage with any of the characters or ideas you may or may not have seen in either advertisements or your imagination. Our direct engagements, aside from those personal and solitary ones with the products themselves, are with salespeople, team members, customer service reps, phone support, etc. Our experiences with those people are further detached under the defensive facade of “they are not the company, they just work for the company.” Verizon notoriously does a particularly terrible job when it comes to hiring informed, positive phone reps. Apple, on the other hand, has done an excellent job of hiring sales reps for their retail stores, as well as friendly and competent phone reps. Trader Joe's has done a fantastic job when it comes to how they train their floor staff. Can you think of any other grocery store whose employees actually stop what they're doing when you approach them, and walk you to the item you're searching for with a smile on their face?

It was an interesting experience when I first began seriously considering electronic production as the career I'd pursue. Many people who comprise the mainstream (those that populate the population Popular music claims to be favored by) don't really know what it is, or what it entails. Conversations might go something like this:

I've even had young students say things to me like, “I just thought it was all made by [artist],” which isn't a wrong thought per se, but rather a lack of any thought at all.

Throughout musical history, from the days when beautiful songs were written by hand, they too were largely written by people other than the artist. Looking even further back to the times of our great composers Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Chopin, Handel, etc, they too had their composition students write a notable amount of their “original” material.

There's a lot of tedious work that goes into a creative product, especially one geared for selling to the mainstream. There are trends and formulas to follow. (There are formulas in all kinds of music, though not all music feels formulaic. Pop feels the most formulaic because there's a lot of it, and so the formula becomes obvious when your ears are bombarded with it at a much higher frequency than other styles of music. But the only reason there's a lot of it is the exact same reason any company manufactures a high number of any product in their factories — to sell.) The tedious, more formulaic parts of producing EDM can essentially be done by anybody with the technical know-how. Are they the important parts of the song, responsible for making it successful? That's a tough question to answer, because you'd eventually confront the need to define what makes a ‘song’ in the first place, in which case I could argue that the piece of paper with ink on it that I just handed you constitutes the song, and the recording you're enjoying listening to is merely a sonic representation of what’s on the paper.

Many successful pop songs employ astonishingly beautiful melodies that I would argue comprise the majority of what makes the song what it is. Trends in music production are then applied, to get the song to fit the mold of what's popular today. But those songs would (should) be beautiful whether they were realized as dance beats in a club, or by a bluegrass band in the south. In other words, excellent writing should transcend the genre.