Max Martin

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Max Martin has written or co-written 29 number-one singles on the Billboard Hot 100. Only Paul McCartney, with 32, has more. Martin was born Karl Martin Sandberg on the 26th of February 1971 and grew up in Stenhamra, in Ekerö Municipality, Stockholm County. His mother taught middle school, and his father was a police officer. Nothing in that childhood points toward pop history. So how did a boy from a Stockholm suburb end up behind songs that millions sing without ever hearing his name? Why did stars from several different eras keep coming back to him? And what did he do inside the studio that other producers did not?

  15752

• 2. Metal Years

  ›

  Martin once said he had public music education to thank for everything. As a child he was a student in Sweden's public music-education scheme, and the training stayed with him.

  In 1985 he joined a glam-style metal band called It's Alive as its singer and frontman. Peter Kahm formed the group with guitarists Per Aldeheim and Kim Björkgren, both formerly of Lazy, and with John Rosth, who had played in Lineout. Martin eventually dropped out of high school to chase a music career, performing under the nickname Martin White.

  In 1988 the band entered Rock-SM, the Swedish Rock Championship, a nationwide battle of the bands. It also held a residency at a nightclub in Cyprus. A breakthrough came in 1991, when Dave Constable of Megarock Records offered the band a chance to make a demo record. The debut album was pressed in only 1,000 copies. A British magazine, Metal Forces, later gave it away as a free cover tape.

  The commitment paid off with a record deal on Cheiron Records, the label of producer Denniz Pop and a BMG affiliate. The band recorded a second album, Earthquake Visions, and released three singles alongside it. In 1994 it toured Europe supporting Kingdom Come. The album appeared in as many as 30 countries, yet it sold a disappointing 30,000 copies. The failure mattered less than what had started in the same building, where the young singer was writing pop songs with Denniz Pop.

  1718152

• 3. A Borrowed Name

  ›

  In 1993 Cheiron Studios hired Martin, and he spent time there learning the basics. The first production collaboration between Denniz Pop and Martin came in 1994, on the Rednex song "Wish You Were Here".

  His famous name arrived by accident. Martin produced the intro to E-Type's song "This Is the Way". E-Type and Pop credited the work to a made-up producer called Max Martin. Martin found out only afterward, when the printed records came back from the plant. Pop had seen a talent for pop songwriting in the young rocker, and he became Martin's mentor.

  The pair soon worked together on Ace of Base's second album, The Bridge, released in 1995. They also contributed to albums by 3T, Army of Lovers and Leila K. The Bridge has since sold more than six million copies worldwide, including one million in the United States.

  Martin left It's Alive in late 1995, and Anders Hansson replaced him as singer. That same year Zomba hired Cheiron Studios to work on a debut album for a group called the Backstreet Boys.

  1718192115

• 4. Songs Before Singers

  ›

  The traditional record business had an artist or songwriter write the songs and then hire a producer to shape the sound. At Cheiron, the order ran the other way. The producers wrote the songs, played the instruments, engineered the recordings and mixed them. The artist was brought in near the end, to sing.

  Britney Spears's second album, Oops!... I Did It Again, shows how far this went. By early November 1999, Cheiron had already written seven songs and recorded the layers of music. Spears had not yet arrived at the studio. Her vocals took only one week. Martin and his team worked more like a band that alternated singers.

  Martin described his own method in an interview quoted in the LA Times in 2000. "I want to be part of every note, every single moment going on in the studio," he said. He added, "I'm a perfectionist." He argued that the producer should decide what kind of music is made and what it sounds like.

  When he accepted the Polar Music Prize, Martin named ABBA, Kiss, Prince and Lasse Holm as his inspirations.

  168646516

• 5. Boy Bands and Britney

  ›

  "Quit Playing Games (with My Heart)", co-written with Herbie Crichlow, quickly went platinum in 1996 and climbed to number 2 on the Billboard Hot 100. The Backstreet Boys' debut album did not come out in the United States until 1997. Overseas it caught on across Europe and sold around 8 million copies worldwide. That success led to a relaunch of the group in their home country, this time far more successfully.

  Martin wrote, co-wrote and co-produced 7 of the 12 songs on their third album, Millennium, in 1999. He worked on all its singles, including "I Want It That Way", which he co-wrote with Andreas Carlsson and co-produced with Kristian Lundin. The song was voted number 10 on the MTV and Rolling Stone list of the 100 greatest pop songs. A VH1 special on the best songs of the 1990s ranked it number 3, the highest of any boy-band single. Millennium sold over 1.1 million units in its first week in the United States, a record that NSYNC's No Strings Attached later beat.

  The next single began as someone else's song. Lisa Miskovsky wrote lyrics for "Shape of My Heart" with Martin and Rami for her own album. She decided it did not suit her style, and Martin passed it to the Backstreet Boys. In its first week it jumped into the top five in Sweden, Norway, Canada, Germany and 15 other countries. The album Black & Blue then sold 1.6 million units in its first week in America.

  By then Martin had already given Britney Spears her start. In 1998 he wrote and co-produced her debut single, "...Baby One More Time". The song was first offered to the Backstreet Boys and to TLC, and both passed. By 1999 the album had sold over 15 million copies in the United States, earning Diamond status. Within a year it had become the best-selling album by a teenager in history, with over 30 million copies sold.

  Martin kept working with Spears on Oops!... I Did It Again and Britney, until she distanced herself from teen pop and the two parted ways. At her request he returned for her sixth album, Circus, in 2008. He co-wrote and produced "If U Seek Amy" for it, and later produced the number-one hit "3". In 2011 he was an executive producer of Femme Fatale, alongside Dr. Luke.

  2122242526

• 6. The Maratone Years

  ›

  Denniz Pop died of cancer in the summer of 1998, and Martin took over as director of Cheiron Studios. He soon began working with writer and producer Rami Yacoub, who remained his partner for many years. In late 1999 he co-wrote Celine Dion's "That's the Way It Is". Since its release in November 1999, it has been played 500,000 times on almost 1400 radio stations across Canada and the United States.

  Cheiron Studios closed in 2000. In January 2001 Martin and Tom Talomaa started a new production company named Maratone and moved into the Cosmos Studios building. The first songs written and produced there were four tracks for Britney Spears's album Britney. The early Maratone crew was Martin, Rami, Alexandra, Arnthor Birgisson and Shellback. After the 2003 work on Dion's One Heart, few new hits came out of the studio until 2005.

  The drought ended after Kelly Clarkson traveled to Sweden in 2004 to work with Martin and Dr. Luke. The sessions for her second album, Breakaway, produced the rock-influenced singles "Since U Been Gone" and "Behind These Hazel Eyes". Pink followed, and "So What" from her album Funhouse became a smash in 2008. During those sessions the pair also wrote "Whataya Want From Me". Adam Lambert recorded it instead, and he announced on Twitter on the 17th of August 2009 that he was in New York with Martin.

  Katy Perry's second album, One of the Boys, brought "I Kissed a Girl" in 2008. Her next album, Teenage Dream, produced four number ones with Martin: "California Gurls", "Teenage Dream", "E.T." and "Last Friday Night (T.G.I.F.)". For her album Prism he co-wrote and produced ten songs, including "Roar" and "Dark Horse".

  Taylor Swift came next. Their first collaboration, "We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together" in 2012, reached number one. On 1989 he co-wrote and co-produced ten songs, three of which hit number one. The chart-toppers were "Shake It Off", "Blank Space" and "Bad Blood". In August 2025 Swift announced her twelfth album, The Life of a Showgirl, with Martin co-producing alongside Swift and Shellback.

  On Ariana Grande's My Everything, he produced "Problem", which reached number 2 in the United States and number 1 in the United Kingdom. On the Weeknd's Beauty Behind the Madness, he co-wrote and produced "Can't Feel My Face", which peaked at number one. He also contributed to the album After Hours. Coldplay brought him in as producer for Music of the Spheres in 2021, where "My Universe", with BTS, debuted at number one.

  1618215270

• 7. Counting the Records

  ›

  "My Universe" gave Martin his twenty-fifth number one as a writer and his twenty-third as a producer. That tied him with George Martin for the most Hot 100 number ones by a producer, and he later passed him. In March 2024 his twenty-seventh number one lifted him past John Lennon, who has 26. Twenty-seven of his number ones were also produced or co-produced by him, an all-time chart record as of that month.

  Eight of his number ones debuted at the top of the chart. Since 1995 he has written, co-written or co-produced 119 Hot 100 top 20 hits. According to the chart, "Blinding Lights" by the Weeknd is the best performing song of all time.

  In early 2013 The Hollywood Reporter tallied his singles sales at over 135 million copies. Variety put his net worth at about $260 million in 2017. The previous year, his corporate entity had earned revenue of $54 million and a profit of $19 million.

  In 1999 he became the first non-American citizen to win ASCAP's Songwriter of the Year award. He has since won it a record 11 times. He has won five Grammy Awards, including Producer of the Year. He has also been nominated for an Academy Award for "Can't Stop the Feeling!" and for two Golden Globe Awards. In 2016 he received the Polar Music Prize.

  His songs also fill a stage show. The jukebox musical & Juliet, built from his catalog, opened on the West End in 2019. It appears in the 2023 Tony Awards list for Best Musical.

  7559810

• 8. Disciples and Causes

  ›

  The music site Stereogum names three people as Martin's "disciples": Savan Kotecha, Dr. Luke and Shellback. When Kotecha worked with One Direction, he credited Martin's influence. "We work melody first. That's Max Martin's school," he said. He added, "In Sweden, you don't do anything until you do it right."

  The New Yorker called Martin Dr. Luke's Swedish mentor. "If Luke is the Skywalker of pop songcraft, Max is the Obi-Wan: the reclusive master," it wrote. Dr. Luke has said Martin taught him to make tracks for a million people instead of five thousand. Shellback, from Karlshamn, became Martin's apprentice at Maratone Studios after 2006, when Martin saw something special in him.

  Martin met his wife, Jenny, who is from Mörrum, around 2000, and they married in 2011. They have a daughter, born around 2001. He lives in Los Angeles and in Stockholm.

  In 2016 Martin joined Björn Ulvaeus and songwriter Niclas Molinder to found the Music Rights Awareness Foundation. It aims to teach music creators about their rights so they can live on their music. The foundation later formed a consortium with the World Intellectual Property Organization, called WIPO for Creators. WIPO Director General Francis Gurry signed the agreement with the three founders, with the COVID-19 crisis in the background.

  671686979