GO-GO'S singer BELINDA CARLISLE on the nasty gossip about her band (five women, managed by a woman) in the LA punk community 40 years ago: "We had sold out. We weren't a punk band. We were ambitious." It never, ever, ever changes... Another thing that struck me watching ALISON ELLWOOD's documentary THE GO-GO'S (now playing on SHOWTIME): One of the primary factors behind the band's breakup was songwriting royalties, which greatly rewarded the group's three primary songwriters while leaving the other two (Carlisle and drummer GINA SCHOCK) out in the financial cold. Schock is the one who pushed the rest of the band to rehearse seven days a week in the early days and who came up with the beat for "WE GOT THE BEAT." But as thousands of drummers, keyboardists and even lead singers have learned, those long hours in a rehearsal studio or basement—developing and perfecting the songs that will make a band's songwriters at least a little wealthier than everyone else—are generally uncompensated, and the beat is among the many elements that often go unrewarded in songwriting credits. Those credits, which are most bands' most valuable assets, are almost always subjective, guided as much by economics and politics as by anything else. Bands can choose to treat the creation of words and chords as executive-level work and everything else—including the creation of keyboard hooks and drumbeats—as manual labor, or they can even it out simply by divvying up the publishing differently. At the very least, everyone making music today, from hip-hop producers to dance-music programmers to rock drummers, is more aware of these economic consequences than the typical musician was 40 years ago. And many are in a position to act on that information. Whenever someone complains about how pop songs used to have one or two credited writers but now they always seem so have five or six or more, I wonder if they stop and think about why that might be, and how the economics of music might figure in to something as simple as whose names show up in that box on the top right of a song's WIKIPEDIA page... Speaking of songwriting: We Redefers love hearing the stories behind the stories: How BUCKWILD spent hours searching for the perfect drum sound for the NOTORIOUS B.I.G. How PHOEBE BRIDGERS came to accept that not all songs have to be ballads. How CHRIS CORNELL stopped writing songs for SOUNDGARDEN fans and started writing them for himself. These, and more firsthand accounts, in MusicSET: "Behind the Song, Vol. 13"... FACEBOOK goes into the music video business... TIKTOK, oy. But it looks like the tech company behind the ZUNE is in position to save TikTok from the whims of the man who destroyed the USFL. But what if those whims aren't wrong?... FOLKLORE had the third-best sales week of any album in the US in the past four years, behind two other albums by guess who... RIP BILL MACK, LEON FLEISHER, STEVE HOLLAND, JIM DELEHANT and ALAN PARKER, the great British director whose films included FAME, THE COMMITMENTS, PINK FLOYD: THE WALL and EVITA. "One of the few directors to truly understand musicals on screen," wrote ANDREW LLOYD WEBBER.