ABSTRACT
To date there has been very little academic enquiry into the production of pop music from the 1980s onwards, and because it is so overtly commercially driven, pop music is typically viewed as derivative, rather than innovative, following stylistic and musical trends of the time. However, as with all cultural products, pop music production involves drawing from a specific cultural tradition and symbol system, adding an amount of originality and then presenting this product to the social organization that understands that cultural tradition for verification (Csikszentmihalyi and Wolfe, 2000). One of the most prominent and commercially successful pop production teams of the 1980s were Mike Stock, Matt Aitken and Pete Waterman (SAW), who adopted a complete in-house co-production approach (songwriting, recording and production) and employed a team of engineers, programmers, musicians and artists in creating their records.
