A Guide to All Creative Directors

A Guide to All Creative Directors

A Guide to All Creative Directors

A Guide to All Creative Directors

A Guide to All Creative Directors

A Guide to All Creative Directors

A Guide to All Creative Directors

A Guide to All Creative Directors

A Guide to All Creative Directors

A Guide to All Creative Directors

A Guide to All Creative Directors

A Guide to All Creative Directors

A Guide to All Creative Directors

A Guide to All Creative Directors

A Guide to All Creative Directors

A Guide to All Creative Directors

A Guide to All Creative Directors

A Guide to All Creative Directors

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Why are the authors of Sanremo songs always the same?

It's not a conspiracy, it's just pure, healthy capitalism

Why are the authors of Sanremo songs always the same? It's not a conspiracy, it's just pure, healthy capitalism

The Sanremo Festival 2025 hasn't even started yet, but the controversies, as usual, have already made headlines. First, there was the complaint from Codacons against Rai (the Italian public broadcasting company) and the new artistic director of the Festival, Carlo Conti, to introduce a sort of "ban" for artists who in the past have been known for their violent or sexist lyrics. Then there was the issue of the alleged censorship by Carlo Conti towards political and social themes: "no war and immigration" he had said in the November 26th, 2024 episode of the music podcast "Pezzi: dentro la musica," curated by Luca Dondoni, Andrea Laffranchi, and Paolo Giordano. The Festival host, in reality, was not imposing a ban, but simply describing the kind of songs that had been submitted by the various artists, which were largely introspective in nature. Finally, last week, the controversy exploded over the hypothetical "cartel" set up by the main songwriters in the competition. To raise the alarm was an article in Il Sole 24 Ore, published on January 21st, in which it was pointed out, with rather sarcastic tones, that about 66.6% of the songs in the competition - that is 20 songs out of 30 - had been written by the same 11 authors. Among these, Federica Abbate stands out, who has her signature on seven songs, and Davide Simonetta who instead reaches five. Following are Jacopo Ettorre, Davide Petrella (known as "Tropico") and Nicola Lazzarin (known as "Cripo") with four songs each, Luca Faraone, Michele "Michelangelo" Zocca, producer Stefano "Zef" Tognini and singer Blanco with three songs each and finally Paolo Antonacci (son of Biagio) and Shablo with "only" two pieces each.

It cannot be called an "investigation" because in reality the names of the songwriters are public and it is enough to buy TV Sorrisi e Canzoni to read the complete list. To be honest, we can't even talk about some great "scoop" because the issue is now well-known and had already emerged last year. The first to publicly raise the issue was Morgan, with the famous "Annalisagate" of X Factor: in essence, during a live episode of the program, the former Bluvertigo singer had declared that Annalisa's Bellissima was a song "of great banality from a harmonic point of view," if not "harmonically non-existent." The producer and co-author of the song, Davide Simonetta (known as "the Midas king of pop") immediately replied with a sharp post on X (formerly known as Twitter) addressed directly to Morgan: "Never a success and explains things. What a wonderful world." At that point Morgan opened Pandora's box, declaring, in an open letter to Rolling Stone Italia, that in his view in Italy, there is "a limited and clientelistic record industry that [...] commissions the writing of songs always to the same four," which is why it can easily happen that someone "writes the songs of six, seven, eight competitors of the same contest," referring explicitly to Sanremo. Unfortunately, having used the wrong ways and tones, his statements had passed without a trace and were judged, in most cases, as the ravings of a madman. A little over a year later, another famous X Factor judge (as well as the leader of Afterhours) - Manuel Agnelli - would agree with Morgan, literally declaring that nowadays "the lyrics are written by the same teams of authors, in this Morgan is right. It is a flattening that works for the algorithm, but not for creativity."

So is this why the festival songs have seemed all the same for a while now? Because the same people are writing them? It's hard to say with absolute certainty, it's not a mathematical equation, but reasoning purely theoretically it is quite plausible to hypothesize that having a minority of authors writing most of the songs can lead to a lesser variety of the songs themselves, from various points of view, melodic, harmonic, rhythmic and lyrical. In a nutshell, this was more or less the most widespread critical opinion that emerged in the aftermath of last year's Sanremo festival, characterized by the so-called phenomenon of "dinner-rap" - as Emiliano Colasanti of 42 Records had defined it in a famous article in Il Post - that is, the fact that many songs brought to the festival by rappers resembled Cenere by Lazza a little too much, which had come second the year before. It was written by Davide Petrella, who, in that same year, also wrote Due Vite by Marco Mengoni, the winning song. Petrella is so well known in the industry that he even ended up in a dissing by Marracash contained in his song Power Slap, taken from his latest album, in which at one point he says: "And every year the bar is lowered/I try to limbo with my head touching the ground/I remind you, child, who you would be with this slap/Without Sanremo, without the summer hit, without Petrella."

So is it true that there is a sort of mafia cartel, in which a clique of a few chosen authors divides up the Italian music market to the detriment of others? No. This is simply the conspiracy theory view of the story. In reality, the situation seen at Sanremo - not today, but for some years now - is nothing more than the result of how the current music market works. A market in which much less money circulates than in the past and which for this reason increasingly relies on other more profitable markets, such as events, concerts, advertising, TV rights, and merchandising. Record labels today have to make their investments more carefully than in the past: there are no more talent scouts hired by record companies to look for new talents in small clubs. Also no new talent today thinks of performing in small clubs. New talents today exploit the potential of the internet and explode on Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, or at the limit through talent shows. You have to stream, have followers, get views, and have the numbers to arouse interest. In this new dimension, authors have acquired increasing importance: it is they who offer themselves to these new emerging artists, often very young and unprepared to face the big market, offering to write other "safe" songs for them. Safe from what? Safe to become a hit.

For the authors mentioned by Il Sole 24 Ore, the question does not even arise; as another of the magnificent 11, Jacopo Ettorre (who rose to fame in 2019 for having written the Benji & Fede anthem Dove e Quando) had declared at the time: "You have to build a resume, more or less like in all trades: if you write songs that are rewarded in terms of listening figures, you are more in demand on the market and you have the opportunity to greatly expand your collaborations." The most virtuous example of this statement is represented, in the international field, by Max Martin, the Swedish producer who in the last twenty years has churned out the greatest number of pop hits worldwide. From the 90s to today he has written and produced a very long series of pop songs that have reached number one in the charts, from Britney Spears to Taylor Swift, passing through Backstreet Boys, Christina Aguilera, Avril Lavigne, Pink, Katy Perry, Ariana Grande, Lana Del Rey, The Weeknd and many others. It seems risky to compare these giants to the aforementioned Italian authors. Yet Italian record companies seem to blindly trust them. But what they trust even more, in reality, is the listening data provided by streaming platforms.

In his essay entitled Poptimism - Algorithmic Media and the Crisis of Popular Music, sociologist Massimiliano Raffa delves into the meanders of the algorithms that regulate the main music streaming platforms (Spotify, Apple Music, and Amazon Music) revealing, through a cross-referenced method of quantitative data and qualitative interviews, given anonymously by industry professionals, how the platforms monitor the public's listening habits, acquiring an enormous amount of data on "what" we listen to, but also and above all on "how" we listen": for example when and "why" we skip a song. All this information can then be sold and used to recreate other songs that "work", but which are somehow increasingly similar to themselves. In practice, authors and algorithms seem to go together in the same direction of homogenization. Is there a solution? Probably yes, but like Calvino's Invisible Cities, it is not yet possible to see it and then perhaps this solution could be precisely the one proposed by the same writer, that is "to seek and know how to recognize who and what, in the midst of hell, is not hell, and to make it last, and to give it space." After all, of a city - as well as of a song, you don't enjoy the seven or seventy-seven wonders, but the answer it gives to a question of yours.