It’s truly a shame that in the music industry, over half of the artists do not write their own music. As a music aficionado, the first thing I do when I buy an album is look at the credits behind some of my favorite songs. If I don’t have the physical copy, I try to find the credits on Wikipedia or a blog. I like to know for sure whether the person whose music I love so much is authentically his or hers or was penned by someone else.

I looked at the credits for Rihanna’s recent album Unapologetic. Producers and writers wrote nearly all of the songs, except for the nursery rhyme lyrics from ‘Pour It Up’. A feature story written in ELLE magazine in their September issue talked about how simple it is for writers to pen a song for an artist after an editor for the magazine decided to seek out songwriter Kara DioGuardi. The editor mentioned that it took Kara and her team of songwriters all of five minutes to write the song she would later record as an experiment – five minutes.

That was one of the most alarming facts that I ever read of the music industry and called into question the speed at which all of the other songs I know and love were written. If a hit single takes five minutes to write, than how long did it take to create the gimmicks to go along with it? That’s not to say that everything that has made a difference in our world took hours or even years to create, but how is the authenticity of a song supposed to mean anything to the person who is singing it if they didn’t write it? I understand the argument that the artist, “make the song their own,” but how much of it belongs to them when they barely make any money off of it?

When the producer or writer is the sole creator of the song an artist sings, depending on the contract, they get royalties off of the song for its entire existence. Whenever it is used in commercials, the writer or producer receives a check. If the single goes platinum, the producer or writer gets paid first. If the album goes platinum, the producer and writers get paid first. Everyone who contributed to the sound and images of the artists we see today, artists who have no control over said sound and image, get paid before the artist does.

While I disagree with the idea that everything we do should be for the love of money, that idea should deter people who are not able to articulate their own thoughts from becoming an artist. I may not necessarily be a fan of Taylor Swift’s high school bathroom stall lyrics, but I will always have a respect for her because she writes all of her music. A lot of producers and songwriters become artists as well, but few are able to translate the star power they create in others with themselves. Producers such as The-Dream, Ne-Yo and The Neptunes are successful in their careers behind the scenes as musical mediums. They were lucky in that their personal endeavors are successful as well, but as a fan of two out of the three, I think they are rare cases.

I find myself being a fan of the producer more than the artists nowadays. That’s not to say that all artists sing the songs of others and I completely disregard them, but few are able to make me forget that fact.  The point is that the artist is supposed to be so talented on their own that the reality of their success doesn’t trump that talent. Not all artists possess that, which is just as troubling as the five minutes it took to write their hit songs.