Ranking the Rock Writers

The first systematic bottom-up look at the writers of the rock era, using publicly available information, including copyrights, royalty rights, labels and crowdsourced databases. The data set is huge—all three major magazines, 24,426 songs, 11,834 writers and 10,773 writer teams. Each song is scored, then the score is allocated to the writers to rank each writer and writer team in the era. Writer aliases and similar names have been rationalized to assign one name to each writer and one writer to each name.

There are two major indexes:

All the songs: Title, Act, Label, Number, where they charted, earliest entry and highest peak. Other song characteristics are noted: instrumentals, and whether words and music have separate writers; songs that originated in a foreign language and were translated or given new English lyrics, and more.

All the writers: Each song attributed to them, listed in order of chart strength.

Then there are the fun lists:

• Top 2000 Writer teams with their songs
• Top 200 Writers and Writer Teams with their first and biggest songs
• Top 100 Writers and Writer Teams in each decade by score and
  number of charted hits
• Top 750 Acts and the writers who supported them
• Top 100 songs by one, two and three writer teams
• Top 150 songs by score, counting all charted versions
• A unique timeline for each of the Top 30 Writer Teams showing each hit by chart strength and entry date and a brief narrative about their chart performance.