Songwriting Camps: Geschichte, Theorien und Erkenntnisse zur Fließband-Produktion von populärer Musik.

This chapter looks at songwriting camps, a contemporary collaborative music production space convened by music publishers, record labels, aggregators or collecting societies. Creative professionals with different qualifications come together in these camps to divide the labor of writing songs in an assembly line fashion. Based on a literature review, this chapter provides historical insights and attempts to highlight developments. It discusses key issues around collaborative songwriting to evaluate how recent songwriting camps fit into the practices of popular music songwriting dating back to the early twentieth century. The songwriting profession is characterized by opposites, as is its recent manifestation in camps: Songwriting is fundamentally creative and liberating, but also formulaic and bound by various musical, creative, social, organizational and legal constraints. Commercial songwriting can be personal, expressive and authentic, but usually takes place within structures that are primarily geared towards commercial exploitation and success. Songwriting camps are the most recent manifestation of the assembly line production of popular music and perhaps represent the culmination of these frictions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]