The Hacker Who Wrote the Soundtrack to the Sixties
I was halfway through a massive, algorithmically generated Spotify focus playlist yesterday when the reports of his passing started flooding my timeline. Neil Sedaka, the architect behind some of the most inescapable pop melodies of the 20th century, died at 86.
Most of the mainstream obituaries—including the initial alerts from Reuters and other major outlets—are framing him as a classic pop crooner. A guy who wore sequined blazers and sang catchy tunes about calendar girls and breakups. But for those of us who spend our days obsessing over user retention, engagement metrics, and product life cycles, looking at Sedaka merely as a "singer" completely misses the point.
Neil Sedaka wasn't just a performer. He was a hacker. Long before Silicon Valley figured out how to keep our eyes glued to screens, Sedaka was busy reverse-engineering the human auditory system to figure out exactly what made a brain release dopamine.
He wrote over 500 songs during his lifetime. Between 1959 and 1963 alone, he engineered 9 top-ten singles. That kind of output doesn't happen by accident, and it certainly doesn't happen just by waiting for a muse to strike. It happens through rigorous, almost clinical iteration.
The Brill Building: The Original Tech Incubator
To understand Sedaka's genius, you have to understand where he came from. He was a classically trained pianist—good enough that he was originally selected by Arthur Rubinstein to play on classical radio. But he took that high-level technical proficiency and pivoted to mass-market consumer goods.
He set up shop in the Brill Building in New York. If you want a historical parallel, the Brill Building was the 1960s equivalent of Y Combinator. It was a high-pressure, hyper-competitive incubator where teams of writers sat in tiny cubicles with pianos, grinding out hits for the teenage market. You could write a song in the morning, sell it in the afternoon, and hear it on the radio a few weeks later.
Sedaka and his writing partner, Howard Greenfield, treated songwriting like code. They studied global hits. When Sedaka wanted to break into the international market, he didn't just guess what people wanted. He literally bought the top three records in multiple countries, analyzed their chord progressions, mapped out their structural similarities, and synthesized those elements into his own tracks.
