How did Motown turn making hit records into a factory?

Motown made hits rather the way Detroit made cars: songs moved past specialist workers on a tight schedule and were inspected before they went out. Berry Gordy's label, founded in Detroit in 1959 as Tamla Records, took its name from "motor" and "town", a nickname for the city at the heart of the US car industry, and its production process has been described as factory-like. The Hitsville studios were open 22 hours a day, and artists coming off tour would record as many songs as possible before leaving again.

Gordy started small. He had opened a Detroit record shop, 3D Record Mart, to educate customers about the beauty of jazz. When he needed $800 to cover his end of a distribution deal for the song "Come to Me", he asked his family to borrow from their cooperative savings account, and in January 1959 the record came out on his new Tamla label. It became the Motown Record Corporation in 1960.

The inspection was Friday morning. Gordy held a quality-control meeting every week and used his veto so that only the best material was released. The test was that every new release had to fit into a sequence of the week's top five selling pop singles. He was not always right: he rejected two of Marvin Gaye's biggest songs at first, "I Heard It Through the Grapevine" and "What's Going On".

The workers were a tight-knit band of studio musicians called the Funk Brothers, who played the band tracks on a majority of Motown recordings. Much of the sound came from layering: two drummers instead of one and three or four guitar lines. The result was a label that helped integrate popular music: it was African American-owned and crossed over to white audiences, and 79 of its songs reached the top ten of the Billboard Hot 100 between 1960 and 1969.