We all know that pop hits — and the stars who sing them — are carefully managed products. John Seabrook, a staff writer for The New Yorker, reveals just how they’re manufactured in his new book The Song Machine. Seabrook traces the evolution of today’s pop songs from Sweden in the early 1990s, and shows how the assembly-line method perfected there came to dominate American pop. But just because they're formulaic doesn't make hits easy to write.

Kurt Andersen: You write that the biggest change in pop production isn’t the songwriters — it’s how those songs are produced.

John Seabrook: What is new is that rather than have a melody writer and a lyric writer sit down together in a room, with production added later, now the production comes first. The reason it’s done that way is, it’s a much faster way of producing a large number of songs. You can have a producer write a few tracks, send them out digitally to a number of melody writers, and get multiple potential songs for every track they’ve composed. 

I thought it was just me, but in your book you point out that a lot of pop music doesn’t just sound the same — sometimes it is the same. You mention two songs in particular, Beyonce’s “Halo” and Kelly Clarkson’s “Already Gone.”

Yes, those two songs actually have the same tracks. The same producer, Ryan Tedder, made the track and sent it out to two different melody writers. Two different songs were written. Somebody screwed up, and Beyonce came out with “Halo.” Kelly Clarkson was about to release “Already Gone” and wanted to pull it from her record. That didn’t happen, and then it went on to become just as big a hit as “Halo.”