What is it with Chris Brown featuring Rihanna, Lil Wayne featuring Bow Wow.
Can’t anyone do their own songs anymore?
You never saw The Rolling Stones featuring Frankie Valli or The Monkees featuring Bobby Sherman. Sure there were one off colloborations like the Temptations and Supremes and Glenn Campbell and Bobbie Gentry but this “featuring” phenomenon is ridiculous.
It's great marketing if done correctly.
It's wrong to think of popular music in the old "band" framework, where musical groups wrote their own songs, put out music by albums and picked out producers.
The producers are now in the driver's seat - they write and produce individual tracks and decide which singers/MCs they think would be best for them, mixing and matching artists to create the most saleable combinations.
This is, in a way, a return to the model of the late 50s/early 60s where labels had stables of performers and also house songwriters and assigned songs to performers they felt were best suited to the material.
The Beatles kept it somewhat secret, though, right? I’ve never seen “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” by The Beatles feat. Eric Clapton.