This is precious little to do with music, but bear with me!

I recently gave a talk to about 50 people on a computer system we were developing and gave the figure of about 20 lines of code a day as a typical productivity figure bandied about the industry. When I was preparing the talk I decided to try to work out what the similar figures would be for other jobs. The main criteria was these must be essentially requiring intellectual rigour - so I would consider eg textbooks but not Barbara Cartland novels

I looked at the authorship of the American Declaration of Independence, how long Tom Paine took to right 'The Rights of Man' and how long the UK Parliament took to pass - if indeed it ever does - the 'Hunting with Dogs' act.

Apart from the Parliament, they all took round about the 20 lines per day, as far as we can tell, although people working on their own tend to be a lot more productive (TP was, I think, about 50 lpd).

The UK Parliament is running slightly below one letter a day on that Act.

Now back to music. Obviously, there will be huge variations, but has anyone any suggestions of the productivity rates for music for us run-of-the-mill musicians? Did Tin-Pan_alley set a productivity rate, for example?