Songwriting: A dying industry?

I've been doing a bit of research into the state of songwriting these days, and found some disturbing trends.

The following chart shows the number of searches performed on Google for the word "songwriting" over the last few years.

The horizontal line marked "1.00" is the average over the last 6 years, and the top blue squiggly line indicates the relative frequency of searches for "songwriting." At this point in 2009, we're at about half the level we were at in 2004, and the trend has been consistently downward over these years.The bottom blue squiggle, interestingly, shows the frequency with which the word "songwriting" appears in the news -- and that's been on the rise. So the dip in interest in songwriting can't be because it's less relevant.

Decrease in Songwriting Interest?

What gives? I've tried to come up with an explanation that works, but I'm at a loss. The options, as I see them:

• THEORY: people are just as interested as ever in songwriting, but aren't looking to the Internet for information. VALIDITY? I doubt this. I'd argue that for everything imaginable, the last 6 years will have seen an increase in searches for any how-to query.

• THEORY: people are still looking online for songwriting info, but Google isn't their search engine of choice. VALIDITY? Really doubt this. Not only do search engines get more traffic now than ever, Google's market share keeps growing. And it's unlikely that songwriters, as a group, all happen to have the same bias against the world's most popular search engine.

• THEORY: the people who would search Google for "songwriting" are the wannabe songwriters, not the legitimate ones, and therefore the graph just shows that there are fewer wannabes. VALIDITY? Very possible, though I'd still wonder why there are fewer wannabes. (One of the reasons above or below, perhaps?) And regardless, wasn't every successful songwriter once a wannabe? So if this theory is right, it doesn't buy me any peace.

• THEORY: there are simply fewer people interested in songwriting today. VALIDITY? This is what I'm left with.

This obviously leads to the question: Why do people care less today about songwriting? Here I have nothing but random speculation. In an Internet age, where file sharing has made it harder to get rich off writing music, maybe we've lost the opportunists looking for a quick buck. Or maybe legitimate musical contenders are too discouraged by the state of music, or the state of the industry, and are jumping off the bandwagon. What are your theories? I'd love to hear them.

(graph from the Google Trends tool: google.com/trends)

Comments

[TheSameOldSong]

I think song writing has become a secondary part of making music. My experience is that lyrics are now just a filler to a song. Today, few people sit down and *listen* to music, eyes either close or reading along with the lyrics in the album cover. Music is now a supplement to daily activities like jogging, working, parties, and traveling. Well thought-out lyrics would be a waste to people just looking for a song they know the chorus to.

I think the results from Google searches are merely showing the very tail end of this decline. Song writing is something few people are interested in -- anyone who actually needs to write the lyrics for a radio-targeted single can just pull out words that relate to the listener, demographic, or fit well within the chorus; the actually meaning of the lyrics is often superfluous.

[Oneoverphi]

If you do a trends search on 'song theory' you end up with the reverse trend.

http://www.google.com/trends?q=song+theory&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=0

I think that maybe, as the web gets more and more flooded with information (spammy or otherwise), broad searches like 'songwriting' don't yield the same quality results they would have when the web was young and the number of pages related to songwriting would have numbered in the thousands to tens of thousands. Typing 'songwriting' in Google today I have 5,870,000 results to sift from.

What you may be seeing is searchers being more sophisticated and specific with their web searches: using 2 or 3 word searches, searching for topics related to songwriting like lyrics or chord progressions, etc.

While I agree that music has been commodified (if that is a word) in ways never before imagined, I don't take so cynical a view as TheSameOldSong. For the same reason we will never consume meals in pill form à la Jetsons, is that we enjoy the act of eating. In the same way I think we enjoy the act of producing and consuming meaningful music too much to reduce our musical diet to meagre pill form, stripped of all fullness and flavour. Who doesn't know of a song or two which speaks to them on a trancscendent level?