§ THE COME-UP · 2 MIN READ
She Wrote the Hit Before She Had One
YK Niece wrote Ari Lennox's Pressure and spent years as the pen behind other people's records. This year she landed her own first entry on the Billboard Hot 100.
By Culture
THE SHORT VERSION
YK Niece is a songwriter and artist who wrote Ari Lennox's song Pressure and has since achieved her first entry on the Billboard Hot 100 as an artist in her own right. Her path, writing for others before breaking through under her own name, is one of the most durable routes in the music business.
The most reliable career in music is the one nobody applauds in public. Somebody wrote the song. That person gets paid every time it plays, and most listeners will never learn their name.
YK Niece wrote Pressure for Ari Lennox, which is the kind of credit that establishes a writer inside the industry long before the public catches up. This year she has landed her own first entry on the Billboard Hot 100 as an artist.
That sequence, write for others, then step forward, is one of the most durable paths in this business and one of the least discussed. Writers understand song structure from the inside, they have relationships with producers and A&Rs, and they arrive with a catalogue rather than a demo.
This is the part worth understanding even if you never intend to be an artist.
A song generates at least two separate income streams. There is the recording, which is what the performer and the label own. And there is the composition, the song itself, which the writers and publishers own.
Those are different assets with different owners. A writer who never sings a note earns from the composition every time the song is played anywhere: radio, streaming, a film, a bar, a television advert, a cover version thirty years later.
It is why the industry's quiet fortunes belong to writers, and it is the same lesson Ray Charles was applying in 1959 when he asked for his masters, one asset over.
“The performer gets the crowd. The writer gets the cheque, for decades.”
The route YK Niece took is available: build the credits, learn the rooms, then release under your own name from a position of leverage rather than hope.
Frequency is where to put the work, and an artist uploading direct out of Compton is the version of this happening locally. Being early on somebody is the entire point of this section.
- Who wrote Ari Lennox's Pressure?
- YK Niece, who has since landed her first entry on the Billboard Hot 100 as an artist under her own name.
- How do songwriters get paid?
- Separately from performers. A song has two distinct assets: the recording, owned by the performer and label, and the composition, owned by the writers and publishers. Writers earn from the composition every time the song is played anywhere, including radio, streaming, film, television and cover versions.
- What is a performing rights organisation?
- An organisation such as ASCAP, BMI or SESAC that collects performance royalties on behalf of songwriters and publishers. Registering as a member and separately registering each composition are two different steps, and writers commonly do the first and forget the second.
- What are songwriting splits?
- The agreed percentage each writer owns of a song. They should be written down and signed in the room on the day of the session, because the most common dispute in music involves a song that succeeds years later and collaborators remembering the session differently.
