“This is a labor of love for me,” says Lauren Christy. The hit songwriter, whose credits include Avril Lavigne ’s “Complicated,” Bebe Rexha’s “Me, Myself and I” and Enrique Iglesias’ “Tonight (I’m Lovin’ You),” is talking about the just-released collection Their Hits, My Way featuring her own interpretations of her greatest hits, but she could just as easily be referring the profession of songwriting itself.

When Christy was coming up, first as an artist and later as part of production trio The Matrix, the economics of the craft were starkly different from those of today. In the ’90s and early 2000s, you could make a comfortable living from writing songs on a commercial release. Even if said song wasn’t a single, the proportional pay from an album cut — with LPs or CDs costing upwards

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