Ryan Tedder & David Israelite Talk Challenges Facing Songwriters Today: ‘It’s a Lottery Ticket… And It’s Not Sustainable’

“Back in 2005, I used to only [write], maybe, 15-16 songs in a year,” says Ryan Tedder — member of OneRepublic, songwriter, producer and founder of Runner Music. “My batting average was like three out of five, which was all you needed… Now, I do probably, honestly, 7-10 a week to achieve not even the same level of hits that I had 10 years ago.”

On the season 1 finale of Billboard’s music business podcast On the Record w/ Kristin Robinson, Tedder and NMPA president and CEO, David Israelite, join the show to talk about the challenges facing songwriters today — from the decline of radio, the fall of album sales and the rise of larger writing rooms — leading songwriting talents like Tedder to make up for these challenges by upping their output.

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The two guests offer separate vantage points on what’s happening to the profession. Tedder has experienced the shift firsthand as a working songwriter and producer for the past two decades: During his career, he’s penned hits like “Halo” by Beyoncé, “greedy” by Tate McRae, “Welcome to New York” by Taylor Swift and “Turning Tables” by Adele, along with hit songs for his band OneRepublic. Meanwhile, Israelite, at the helm of the NMPA, offers his deep understanding of how songwriter income works and how the profession has been undercut over time. His organization plays a key role in advocating for better publishing royalty rates, specifically at the Copyright Royalty Board, and has helped usher in key legislation like the Music Modernization Act (MMA) to support the music industry through technological change.

You can watch the full episode below, or find it on Spotify, YouTube and Apple Podcasts.

To get started, I’d like to compare and contrast how songwriting used to be. Take me back to the mid-20th century in the heyday of Carole King and the Brill Building system. How does that compare to today’s songwriting business?

Israelite: It’s a completely different industry today than it used to be, which is why it’s so challenging to be a songwriter today. The rules are different…the way the economics work is different. One of the biggest changes is that it used to be that you could be a songwriter that got a song on an album. If the album were successful, you were going to be successful. It didn’t matter whether or not the one song you may have contributed was the hit song from the album, because the economics were all tied into the idea that people bought albums. So getting cuts was a very big goal of songwriters for artists that were going to sell big albums. Today, those economics are completely different. It’s now about singles and about hits, and so getting an album cut can mean nothing, because you’re really talking about a streaming economy where it’s about the individual hits that people listen to. So I think that’s one of the biggest changes for songwriters, is that they have to be hit writers.

Tedder: The difference between now and then is then, you used to be able to show up every day to write, knowing there was a high chance of what you were doing that week, that day would land on an album. And to David’s point, make a meaningful income. Now, you might have to write five to 10 times the volume of songs with zero hope or guarantee that it will earn anything.

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One of the changes in the music business that is seen as a positive is that the barriers to entry, the gatekeepers, are now mostly gone. Anyone can make it. How did the opening of those floodgates in music impact songwriting as a profession?

Tedder: The barrier to entry now is decent Wi-Fi…Anytime you remove barriers to entry in any field, right, in any business, if you remove the barriers to entry, I think chaos reigns until you figure it out…[Back in the day], there was a relationship between mass media and the music industry. It was a beautiful marriage that lasted about 80, 90 years. It was very simple: you did four to five years of development, you got your record deal, you wrote a hit and now we put all our muscle as a record label behind you. We’re going to book you on The Today Show, Tonight Show, The Voice finale, and if you had a record and you did those three things, there was a [huge] chance that you had a hit….[Now, creating a hit song] is a lottery ticket, and winning the lottery isn’t a business plan. It’s not sustainable.

It’s clear that the number of songwriters on hit songs has increased a lot over the last few decades, but to me, it feels like that’s not the only problem. There are also folks that would typically be seen more as artists who also cut into the songwriter’s income. How big of a problem is this today?

Israelite: It’s a huge problem, and you have to understand the sources because there are two different issues at play. The first is that artists always want to be thought of as songwriters…So there is a pressure for artists to take credit for songwriting, even if they didn’t do that, in part because of their own ego or because they think it helps with their connection with fans.

But there’s a completely separate reason, which is that the economics of music and of the music industry has put a greater focus on trying to get some of that publishing money. Because…streaming pays less — there are more people now sharing in that money, including streaming services themselves, which didn’t used to be part of the equation when you sold albums — so artists often look at publishing as a way to supplement their revenue.

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And if you’re a writer, it’s a really tough place to be, because you are given a choice of, you can have maybe a very famous artist record your song. That’s a pretty good guarantee that you’ll make some money from your song if a more famous artist records it. But do you want to give up ownership of that, especially if it wasn’t earned? And it’s very difficult to speak out about the practice, because you complain about it, you’ll never write with that artist again, and maybe other artists won’t want to write with you. Songwriters are put in a terrible position about this, and many of them make the choice to just let it go and let the artist take a piece of credit they don’t deserve.

Ryan, I imagine you’ve had a lot of experience with this yourself.

Tedder: I haven’t had a year where it hasn’t happened. I’ve shut it down. I’ve also had times where I’ve realized that even if I lose 10 or 15% of this song, it’s such a massive thing that I’d rather have 80% of something than 100% or nothing. And I’ll just go on record as saying this: It’s happened to me more times than I can count, but when artists do that, the whole writing community finds out. Nothing spreads quicker than that.

Israelite: You also have to understand that he’s experiencing this as Ryan Tedder. Imagine you are an unknown songwriter that’s just starting out, and you don’t have the name, ID and the credibility and the connections that someone like Ryan does. It’s a serious problem.

There have been many ideas thrown around as to how to get songwriters paid better. Per diems is one of them. The Ivors Academy in the U.K. has gotten some labels to agree to pay per diem rates to songwriters. There are also ideas like offering master points to writers, paying for gas and food, etc. Are these effective methods to help songwriters?

Israelite: When it becomes very hard to make a living as a songwriter, you look for solutions of what might help. One of the things being discussed is the idea that writers should participate more in the recording pool of money, whether that’s points on the record, a per diem fee, or some kind of flat upfront fee. Because remember, as a songwriter, you may give your song to an artist, but you don’t necessarily know they’re going to release it as the single, or put a lot of marketing behind it, and yet you’re tying up that song with that one artist that could go to someone else.

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There are a lot of things that are being discussed, and we’re supportive of them, but it’s something that is going to have to be decided by the record label and artist community. And unfortunately, the expectation is that if record labels were to do it, they would probably just charge their artists, and it wouldn’t necessarily come out of the record label side.

There’s been this theory in the industry that the first record label that decides to really embrace this and start saying, “We’ll give points. We’ll give fees,” that would get the writers to want to bring their top songs to that label and those artists. And the idea is that, instead of asking the label to do this as some kind of charity or gift, is there a label that sees this as an economic opportunity for themselves to get ahead of their competitors by attracting the better songs by offering these types of benefits? I think that might be a route that you might see some record labels decide to embrace. I can tell you that I think that the hit writers would absolutely do that.