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. book Virgil Moorefield The Producer as Composer : Shaping the Sounds of Popular Music <book> The MIT Press ISBN 0262134578 The record producer has been the deus ex machina of the pop aesthetic innovation in different historical moments. His role is being the architect of the music track, being commissioned to find and arrange the proper components in an effective way, in order to construct a functional and fascinating infrastructure. The author points out that the historical reason of the increased importance of the producer lies on the the primacy of recordings over the live performances, happened in the sixties and embodied by Phil Spector and his paradigmatic professional life. This evolution happened in the path of the eternal search for the music hits' magic formula, and placed the producer in the director's seat, because he controls the tools for shaping the final music product. The process for building music for the masses had his core balance moving from the artist towards the inventive one that had the technological know how. The producer attitude to interpret something new, transferring it in a tune with a distinguishable style, has slowly been devolved to the artists as the music technologies have become accessible. And this parallel evolution, well documented in this text, is one of the key to decode contemporary pop music, and how much it has become a magma where anybody can potentially enjoy the production of his own mashup.