Creative country music songwriters use certain knacks to collaborate with famous singers

Washington: A research team has studied on how creative country music songwriters have to use certain knacks to collaborate with famous singers, who may not be that great in writing music. The need arises among the country songwriters where they have to work with famous singers who may not be much talented at writing songs but have to attract the fans with the stardom of the singers to fill their pockets.

A study of 39 successful country-music songwriters has found that they use two strategies to navigate creative collaboration with more famous artists. The study is published in the journal of Social Psychology Quarterly and originally written by Laura Arenschield.

"You have these recording artists who are being required to co-write their own songs, but maybe that's not their skill," said Rachel Skaggs, the study's author and an assistant professor of arts management at the Ohio State University.

"And then you have songwriters who are brought in to help, and to collaborate, and they have to balance this. There's the need to make money and make a living, and the need to not have their name on a 'bad' song," she further said.

"There are these strategies for when collaborators don't have the same idea of what they want to happen, particularly if one collaborator is much higher status -- a more famous artist who is important to their label," Skaggs said.

One method is where the songwriter might say to the artist, 'Oh, you're from Ohio, so we're going to write a song called 'Ohio Girl," Skaggs said. "It's really kind of hitting on personal branding." While the other technique where the songwriters might try to introduce ideas as though they were the more famous artist's own.

In that case, Skaggs said, the songwriters generally pre-write a large portion of the song -- one songwriter mentioned writing a chorus and several verses ahead of time -- then casually suggest the ideas as if they originated with the artist.

Personal branding is important in this age of social media, Skaggs said, where fans want to feel a connection to the artists they love. Skaggs said her findings could also be applicable in other partnerships where collaborators are mismatched in some way -- an office environment, for example, or a group project in a school or volunteer organisation.