DailyDirt: Composers You've Probably Never Heard Of

Say That Again

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Music is all around us, playing in elevators and on customer support phone calls that seem to take forever to reach an actual human being to speak with. People generally know the names of the singers of the songs that get stuck in their heads, but the composers are often unknown or easily forgotten. As ASCAP celebrates its 100th anniversary, we’ll point out a few composers who you might not recognize.

• Opus No. 1 by Tim Carleton was written in 1989 when Carleton was 16 years old, and his high school buddy Darrick Deel made it the default hold music for about 65 million Cisco phone sets worldwide in the 1990s. The song has achieved a bit of popularity because some people think it’s catchy in a way. [url]
• If you’ve ever wondered why all pop music sounds the same to you, the answer may be Max Martin. Max Martin (aka Martin Sandberg) has written songs for bands/singers such as the Backstreet Boys, Avril Lavigne, Britney Spears, Taylor Swift, Christina Aguilera, Katy Perry, Maroon 5, Justin Bieber, Pink, Kelly Clarkson and many others — and is credited with over a dozen Billboard number-one hits. [url]
• Mamoru Samuragochi is a supposedly deaf composer who wrote a lot of popular music such as the soundtrack for Resident Evil (as well as his Symphony No. 1 “Hiroshima” which sold very well in Japan). A violin piece credited to him will be played in the Olympic figure skating event, but it’s recently been revealed that his music was actually written by Takashi Niigaki and that Samuragochi isn’t really as deaf as he’s been pretending to be. [url]

If you’d like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Filed Under: composers, darrick deel, mamoru samuragochi, max martin, music, pop songs, takashi niigaki, tim carleton
Companies: ascap, cisco