[citation needed] During the ASCAP strike of 1941, many of the composers, authors and publishers turned to pseudonyms in order to have their songs played on the air.

[citation needed] Brill Building songs were frequently at the top of Billboard's Hit Parade and played by the leading bands of the day: Publishers included:[citation needed] Brill Building composers and lyricists during the big band era included:[citation needed] The Brill Building's name has been widely adopted as a shorthand term for a broad and influential stream of American popular music (strongly influenced by Latin music, Traditional black gospel, and rhythm and blues) which enjoyed great commercial success in the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s.

[8] Carole King described the atmosphere at the "Brill Building" publishing houses of the period: Every day we squeezed into our respective cubby holes with just enough room for a piano, a bench, and maybe a chair for the lyricist if you were lucky.

[10] Many of the best works in this diverse category were written by a loosely affiliated group of songwriter-producer teams—mostly duos—that enjoyed immense success and who collectively wrote some of the biggest hits of the period.

Many in this group were close friends and/or (in the cases of Goffin-King, Mann-Weil and Greenwich-Barry[3]) married couples, as well as creative and business associates—and both individually and as duos, they often worked together and with other writers in a wide variety of combinations.

Other musicians who were headquartered in the Brill Building include: Among the hundreds of hits written by this group are "Maybe I Know" (Barry-Greenwich), "Yakety Yak" (Leiber-Stoller), "Save the Last Dance for Me" (Pomus-Shuman), "The Look of Love" (Bacharach-David), "Breaking Up Is Hard to Do" (Sedaka-Greenfield), "Devil in Disguise" (Giant-Baum-Kaye), "The Loco-Motion" (Goffin-King), "Supernatural Thing" (Haras Fyre-Gwen Guthrie), "We Gotta Get Out of This Place" (Mann-Weil), "River Deep, Mountain High" (Spector-Greenwich-Barry), "Big Girls Don't Cry" (Gaudio-Crewe), and "Working My Way Back to You" (Linzer-Randell).

Toni Wine explains: There were really two huge buildings that were housing publishing companies, songwriters, record labels, and artists.

Elvis Presley MusicThe 1996 film Grace of My Heart is in part a fictionalized account of the life in the Brill Building.

In Sweet Smell of Success, J.J. Hunsecker and his sister Susie live on one of the upper floors of the Brill Building.

Stephin Merritt makes reference to the Brill Building on the Magnetic Fields' "Epitaph For My Heart" from their 1999 release 69 Love Songs.

[22][23] The owners also negotiated with CVS Pharmacy and WeWork to lease some of the space,[24] In 2020, the LPC approved a proposal by Bruno Kearney Architects to add LED signs to the Brill Building's facade and modify a ground-floor storefront for TD Bank.