About the book: 2016 / It seems that at the dawn of the 21st century, popular music has reached a completely new phase of development. In order to write a song, you no longer need to masterly play the guitar and have poetic talent, and to sing it, you don’t need a powerful voice - welcome to the era of auto-tune! But it’s one thing to just have a song, and quite another thing to have a hit that can instantly glorify the performer and make its author a millionaire. By the way, who creates all these masterpieces? In his book “The Song Machine. Inside the Hit Factory" John Seabrook, an American cultural scientist and journalist, explores the phenomenon of popular music, its influence on modern society, and also examines in detail the "anatomy" of a hit and comes to an interesting conclusion - it turns out that in such a creative matter as creating a song, there is no originality is important. Everything is subject to strict logic, the “mathematics of melody”, and behind this there is a whole team of professionals - producers, top liners, beatmakers and lyricists. Studying the history of the emergence of hits, Seabrook brings us to another, no less striking idea: it has almost always been this way..