Is Taylor Swift The Most Prolific Solo Songwriter in the Charts?

There are pop stars where the point is the sound, those where it’s the look and those where the point is the vibe, the message or the “rizz.”

But with Taylor Swift, the point is undoubtedly the writing. Swift has created a corpus of work across 233 solo- or co-written album tracks, building a literary universe of raw confessions and hidden meanings. The first pop star billionaire not to have a side gig, Swift relinquishes her pen only for the occasional cover version or guest collaboration — and never for an off-the-rack song written alone by the kind of writer that’s buoyed the careers of many other megastars.

Still, the Taylor Swift phenomenon is a complex machine, and “co-written” may be doing a lot of heavy lifting to maintain Swift’s artistic status as the bard of the 21st-century heartache. So, just how do her writer credits balance against those of her pop star peers? To find today’s most prolific songwriter and see how today’s writing teams measure up against those of yesteryear, WordTips analyzed ​​8,700 songs by 101 artists and 50 years of Billboard Charts.

What We Did

We used Genius.com to find the credited writers on every studio album track from the most popular Billboard Charts singers and rappers. Then, we calculated the percentage of songs each artist had sole writing credits for and the average number of writers per song for each artist. Finally, we analyzed every Billboard Hot 100 Year-End Chart from 1970 to 2023 to reveal trends in solo- vs. team-led songwriting over the past half-century.

Key Findings

• Zach Bryan is the solo writer on 90.9% of his songs, more than any other top solo artist.
• Taylor Swift is the solo songwriter on just 29.6% of her songs. However, Swift has written 69 songs alone, second only to Zach Bryan (90).
• Tyler, The Creator is the most prolific songwriter in rap, writing 42.39% of his material alone.
• The average number of songwriters per Billboard Charts song has risen from 2.0 in 1970 to 4.5 in 2023.

The Popular Singers That Write Solo the Most

First, we looked at the percentage of album tracks that the Billboard Chart’s top contemporary singers have written alone.

 We found that only three pop stars have written more than half of their own songs — and none of them are Taylor Swift, who has written just 69 of her 233 album tracks alone (29.6%). However, because she has released so much material, she is still the second most prolific solo songwriter after Zach Bryan.

Zach Bryan is also the artist with the highest percentage of solo written tracks: 90 out of 99, or 90.9%. The release of the Japan-born, Oklahoma-raised singer’s 2023 self-titled album saw him top the Billboard Songwriter charts in the Country, Rock and Rock & Alternative genres, as well as the Hot 100 Songwriters.

He also has a dismissive attitude towards those who don’t perform their own material: “Songwriting is such a massive part of this,” Bryan told the New York Times. “If you’re missing out on it, what the hell are you doing? You’re just performing. You’re an actor.”

But whose songs require the most writers to write? We averaged the writers-per-song across the same list of top singers’ repertoires and found that Camila Cabello has the biggest writing squad, with an average of 5.5 writers per song — just a few decimal points more than second-placed Lil Nas X and nearly three times as many as Taylor Swift (2.0).

Camila Cabello has a knack for teamwork, launching her post-Fifth Harmony solo career with a string of high-profile collaborations. Her Young Thug colab “Havana” is the work of ten writers, including Cabello, Thug and Pharrell Williams.

“I played him [Williams] what we had of this song,” Cabello says. “We couldn’t crack the code [without him]. He just cracked it… we wrote the verses together in like one minute.”

The Rappers That Write Solo the Most

Next, we applied the same formula to the Billboards’ top rappers. The three rappers who write a higher percentage of material alone than Taylor Swift are Tyler, The Creator (42.39%), Wiz Khalifa (37.40%) and J. Cole (31.40%).

 Rap music may have more multiple-writer credits than melodic pop due to the nature of sampling, borrowed beats and producer/studio dynamic. “With writer’s credit, it can be anything from a melody, to just an idea thrown into the air,” says Kendrick Lamar.

In Tyler’s case, Pharrell Williams plays a more fundamental role: “I didn’t know how to play the piano ’til I was about 13 after I had seen Pharrell play during the Clones DVD,” Tyler told RESPECT magazine. “When I seen him play that piano, I was like, ‘That is the coolest shit ever.’ I was like, ‘I need to learn how to fucking play piano.’ My mom never wanted to give me lessons, so I taught myself to play.”

Kendrick Lamar’s democratic approach to writing credits is reflected across his oeuvre. An average of 5.4 writers per album track makes him the joint eighth most collaborative singer in rap. However, Cardi B (9.1), Kanye West (8.7) and Travis Scott (8.0) work with significantly more names per track, as the chart below reveals.

Cardi B’s high co-writer count may come as a surprise, given how vocal she’s been about her perfectionism, writing her own material and the agonies of writer’s block. “Because I do write a lot of my shit that’s the thing,” she tweeted in 2019. “Yes just like every other artist I do have a couple writer that help with hooks but I wrote plenty of songs on my album specially my mixtape.”

However, Cardi is also known for her high-profile collaborations and for supporting up-and-coming artists, and she has pointed out that “Just because somebody might help me with a hook means nothing. Look at all ya fav artists credits they all do receive some type of help.”

The Decline of Solo-Written Songs in The Billboard Hot 100

Finally, we analyzed the writing credits on every song on the Billboard Hot 100 Year-End Charts from 1970 to 2023, revealing that solo-written hits have become dramatically rarer and that songwriting teams have more than doubled in size. The average number of solo-written songs per chart across our 1970s figures is 16, whereas the corresponding figure for the past ten years is just three.

“Think back 20 years and an artist would take at least two or three albums to really hone their craft as a songwriter,” says Mike Smith, former managing director of music publishers Warner/Chappell UK, adding that today, labels may fast-forward the process by bringing in professional songwriters to bring rookies up to speed — and capitalize on their rising star.

At the same time, both the nature of pop music and our relationship to the perceived authenticity of those who perform it have changed. The recording studio has become a complex arena of electronic instruments and workstation plug-ins, where the texture of the production may define the identity of a song as much as its verbal or musical hooks. Rather than disempowering the artists who put their faces to the music, this approach has fostered the pop star as a “curator” of famous collaborators, backroom writers and even individual melodic lines.

Just look at Beyoncé, who averages 5.4 writers per song. “Beyoncé is a scientist of songs. I’ve never seen anyone work the way she works,” says Diana Gordon, co-writer of “Sorry” and “Daddy Lessons.” “She can take two songs, say, ‘I like two lines, I like the melody then let me use that for a verse and a bridge and write the whole middle.’ It’s more of a collaboration.” As such, the average number of writers per hit in the 1970s was 1.85, which has risen to 4.81 over the past ten years.

Indeed, there’s an argument to be made that the studio crew of today is the band of yesteryear. Damon Albarn shared most of Blur’s early songwriting credits with the rest of the band but said of Taylor Swift’s collaborative technique, “Co-writing is very different to writing. I’m not hating on anybody, I’m just saying there’s a big difference between a songwriter and a songwriter who co-writes.”

Replied Swift on Twitter: “I write ALL of my own songs. Your hot take is completely false and SO damaging. You don’t have to like my songs but it’s really fucked up to try and discredit my writing. WOW.” 

“PS I wrote this tweet all by myself in case you were wondering.”

‘Could it be the best?’

Love or loathe ‘music today,’ pop has become more diverse and sonically creative than even the golden days of the ‘60s and ‘70s. And for better or worse, much of this range has come about due to the way artists collaborate — whether driven by the urge to make the best music they can or forced into ‘songwriting by committee’ by their label.

But it is telling that perhaps the greatest ever pop star David Bowie thrived not only on reinventing himself and the studio but also on collaboration. And it is apt that he collaborated with John Lennon — one of the greatest ever songwriters, a member of the biggest ever band — on writing his first number one, “Fame.”

“I’ll never forget something John Lennon told me,” Bowie later remembered. “We were talking about writing, and I had always admired the way he used to cut through so much of the bullshit, just come straight to the point with what he wanted to say. He said: ‘It’s very easy — all you have to do is say what you mean, make it rhyme and put a backbeat to it.’”

Is that really so much for one person to do by themselves?

Methodology & Sources

We used Genius.com to source all studio albums for the most popular singers and rappers (according to Billboard Charts rankings), manually recording the credited writers for all tracks on each album. 

Using this data, we calculated the percentage of songs for each singer/rapper that the singer/rapper had sole writing credits for. In addition, we calculated the average number of writers per song for each singer/rapper across all the studio albums. In total, we analyzed ​​8,700 songs by 101 artists.

Finally, we sourced writing credits data for all songs in the Billboard Hot 100 Year-End Charts from 1970 to 2023, allowing us to assess trends in solo-written songs and the average number of songwriters per track.

This data analysis was completed in August 2024.