Good Music 13.5:

In my continued assault on Sarah Brightman, I've discovered another eminent composer behind the curtain:  Jose Maria Cano.  He's responsible for 3 of the songs she sings, which gives him a spot in my top 200 eminent composers list.  I kicked out Emi Nitta (who mostly just sings as part of u's anyway) to make room.

Frank Peterson was also responsible for an additional song, When it Rains in America, which moved him up to 7 and Brightman down to 72.

ABBA is the source of one song by Brightman and two by Erasure, so they also make the eminent composers list with 3 song credits.  That moves Brightman down to 71 and Erasure down to 21.  To make room for ABBA I kicked out May'n, who isn't that great without Yoko Kanno composing behind the scenes anyway.

That means there are 11 no-name composers/performers who have composed/performed at least 2 good songs now.  When it rains it pours.

I also corrected the one-hit wonder total to 245 after finding some obscure hidden singers who were in my hall of fame but not my one-hit wonder list through diligent needle in a haystack searching.

As proof that all my composers/performers are being credited properly, if you add up all the song credits from all the 200 names, the 2 song no-names and the one-hit wonders, it adds up perfectly to 4800.  That may be the first time that's ever been true.  I took special pains to give everyone their proper credits this time around and it's finally paid off.

There was an error where if the name of a song was just a number it wouldn't show up properly in the left-hand column, but I fixed that as well.

I don't believe there are any more composers hiding under Sarah's dress, I think this ends the bleeding, and she'll stick with her hard-earned 71 song credits from here.

Of course, most of those 71 songs are covers or composed by professional songwriters, but so long as they're just 1-offs, I figure Sarah's singing talent is more the cause of the song's excellence than the artist's composition ability.  It takes two or more songs composed by the same person to convince me they are the power behind the throne.  If it's just one song I think that should be credited to Sarah.  (The same policy is used for everyone, if a popular singer has 30 song credits and is singing a cover from some random nobody, that credit goes to the singer's clearly excellent voice, not the nobody of dubious compositional ability.)

It's probable that if I investigated other singers like Kana Hanazawa or μ's as thoroughly as Sarah, I'd have to start breaking them apart into smaller fragments too.  But Sarah Brightman is a particularly egregious example of singing cover songs and borrowing from other people, so she stuck out like a sore thumb.  She deserved the extra scrutiny because she cheated more than anyone else by a huge margin.  I'm fine with letting the petty criminals get away with their crimes, but Sarah's reputation was grand larceny.

With all the corrections made, now's as good a time as any to check out my good music permapost:  http://diamed-the-road-less-traveled.blogspot.com/2017/08/good-music.html