"The Middle" — the song eventually recorded by Jimmy Eat World, though the anecdote here concerns a different, pop-context production process the book cites — passed through an extraordinary number of hands before landing on a final version: seven producers, seven songwriters, and thirteen different demo singers (including Demi Lovato, Camila Cabello, and Anne-Marie) before eventually settling on Maren Morris's vocal.1
This case functions in the book as a deliberate extreme example — the far end of pop's team-based songcraft model, pushed to a scale that makes its underlying logic almost absurd. If a single song can plausibly require thirteen different people's vocal takes before the "right" one gets chosen, the entire process of authorship and ownership over that song becomes genuinely murky in a way a solo-written song never has to confront.
You're evaluating whether a highly collaborative, team-based creative process is producing better results than a more concentrated, singular-authorship approach.
This case is worth using as a stress test: if a process this extended and hyperconcentrated (this many contributors for one song) still produces a good outcome, team-based collaboration can clearly work at scale. But it's also worth asking whether the same outcome could have been reached with far fewer contributors, and what the thirteen-demo-singer process specifically reveals about how much trial and error the underlying songwriting required to find the right fit.
It's worth considering why thirteen different singers were tried rather than stopping once a merely competent version existed. That persistence suggests the standard being applied wasn't "does this work" but something narrower and harder to define: a specific, felt sense of rightness that a competent take can still fail to achieve.
That distinction matters, because it reframes the seemingly wasteful churn as a search for something more specific than surface quality — closer to searching for a particular emotional or vocal quality that most competent singers simply don't happen to have, no matter how technically capable their individual takes might be.
It's worth thinking through what each of the twelve discarded vocal takes actually cost, since "thirteen singers were tried" undersells how much real work sits behind that single sentence.
Each demo take likely represents a full studio session: a singer learning the song, recording multiple passes, the production team evaluating the result against whatever standard the song was being measured against. Multiply that by thirteen and the hyperconcentrated process described here isn't just conceptually extreme — it's genuinely expensive, in studio time, singer fees, and production-team hours, all spent before the song had a final vocal attached to it at all.
That expense is part of what makes the case instructive. Most teams, most of the time, can't or won't absorb that level of cost in search of a specific, hard-to-articulate rightness. The willingness to keep going through thirteen attempts says something about how much value was placed on getting the exact right fit, relative to simply shipping a competent version much earlier in the process.
The book doesn't explain in detail what made Morris's take the one that finally worked, which leaves an interesting gap. It's plausible the answer isn't a technical vocal quality at all — pitch, range, and technical control were presumably present in several of the other twelve takes too, or they wouldn't have made it to a formal demo stage in the first place.
More likely, whatever made the difference was something harder to specify: a particular vocal texture, a specific emotional read, some quality of delivery that isn't reducible to technical competence and that the production team recognized only once they heard it, despite presumably not being able to describe in advance what they were listening for.
The specific numbers (seven, seven, thirteen) are cited directly and are a striking, memorable detail.
The tension: the book doesn't fully explain why this specific song required so many more contributors than a typical pop single, leaving open whether this is a representative extreme or a genuine outlier even by pop's own team-heavy standards. Without a comparison case showing typical contributor counts for a similar song, it's hard to know just how unusual thirteen demo singers actually is.
The book uses this case mostly as color, contrasting it implicitly with the solo-writer identity documented elsewhere, without examining what this level of production churn actually costs (in time, money, and creative clarity) relative to its eventual payoff.
That's a real gap in the analysis — the case is presented as an interesting extreme rather than interrogated as a genuine cost-benefit question, which is exactly the question worth asking before treating hyperconcentrated team production as simply "how pop works now."
Team-Based Creativity Replacing the Lone-Genius Model — this extreme case is the far end of the broader trend that page documents; useful as an illustrative outlier rather than a typical instance.
Sharpest implication: team-based creative production can scale to genuinely extreme levels of contributor churn and still work, but the case also raises real questions about what authorship even means once a single song has passed through this many hands.
Generative questions: