Thank you for fighting the good fight Kuci. Take those downvotes with pride. I'll take em, although this is a throwaway.

Everyone hates Kanye, but god forbid someone point out that a large amount of his solo material wasn't written by him; because that leads to the conversation that most popular music today has zero creative input from the "artist" or should I actually say: performer.

http://www.mtv.com/news/1663302/consequence-kanye-west-rapfix/

*and thats just one guy from a few of his first solo albums. Just do a quick google search and you will find even more than that. Look at the wikipedia page for My Beautiful Fantasy, look at how many writers/producers there are for each song. That's not just "producers" as in people who helped with the recording and whatnot, that's actual creative input and sculpting.

Kanye is a pop artist. He made some cool rap beats before he blew up, now he is a pop artist. Who here actually thinks Taylor Swift writes her own songs? What about Kesha? Beyonce? They don't. This is how pop music has been since Elvis Presley & prior to him it's been very much like that just not nearly as heavy handed as it is today. Pop music isn't about the writing or production, it's about the performance.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Matrix_%28production_team%29

Scroll down to their production discography. Exactly. The matrix production team has written a lot of the songs in the past decade that made it big. This is life. There are dozens of other solo writers, or teams just like The Matrix that do the same thing.

Like Kuci said, this stuff should be general knowledge. It's how the music business has functioned for a long time. Problem is, it used to be a lot easier for lesser-known artists to get a record put out and on the shelves at Tower Records, now with the internet changing the game it's finally looking a bit better for the up-and-coming artists, and people actually writing their own music. Now if we could just get the indie-performance (not just purchasing) scene back up for artists of all genres to showcase their material things would be super dope!