This study explores emerging collaborative songwriting models specifically in respect to commercially successful New Zealand contemporary artists. Biographies of popular songwriting partnerships fill gossip magazines, featuring the artist's private lives, but little has been written about the creative process of co-writing from the practitioners' point of view. As a musician and songwriter, my strategy was to look from the 'inside out', rather than from the audience's 'outside in' view at the contemporary songwriting process.

The theoretical framework for this study was provided by Toynbee's social authorship theory (which in turn draws on Bourdieu's notions of habitus and field) and Bennett's discussion of collaborative songwriting practice. These theories were applied to interpret case studies, consisting of structured retrospective interviews with commercially successful New Zealand contemporary songwriters and musicians.

The study found that your co-writer hears ideas that you normally wouldn't. What's more, contemporary song doctors and collaborators are fast becoming masters of technology and with this merging of songwriting and production, collaborative songwriting is a back and forth process of manifestation, communication and updating of ideas.

It was concluded that collaborative songwriting models are functions of the required stimulus needed to create songs. Further to this, when co-writing commercially successful songs, there exists a willingness to understand the field of works, and also to work within the many and varied constraints that exist in the field.