Songs from Sweden: Shaping Pop Culture in a Globalized Music Industry

By Ola Johansson

Songs from Sweden shows how Swedish songwriters and producers are the creative forces behind much of today’s international pop music. As Ola Johansson reveals, the roots of this “music miracle” can be found in Sweden’s culture, economy, and thriving music industry, concentrated in Stockholm. While Swedish writer-producers developed early global recognition for making commercially successful pop music, new Swedish writer-producers have continuously emerged during the last two decades. Global artists travel to Stockholm to negotiate, record, and co-write songs. At the same time, Swedish writer-producers are part of a global collaborative network that spans the world. In addition to concrete commercial accomplishments, the Swedish success is also a result of the acquisition of reputational capital gained through positive associations that the global music industry holds about Swedish music. Ultimately, pop songs from Sweden exhibit a form of cultural hybridity, drawing from both local and global cultural expressions.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Release date: May 16, 2020
• ISBN: 9789811527364

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© The Author(s) 2020

O. JohanssonSongs from SwedenGeographies of Mediahttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-2736-4_1

1. Introduction: The Swedish Music Miracle, from 1.0 to 2.0

Ola Johansson¹  

(1)

Department of Geography, University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown, Johnstown, PA, USA

Ola Johansson

Email: [e-mail]

Abstract

Observers of popular music know that Swedish artists have achieved commercial distinction, as well as artistic acclaim, around the world. This is what I call the Swedish Music Miracle 1.0. However, the Swedish music industry has more and more emphasized songwriting and production rather than artists. Thus, a transition from 1.0 to 2.0 has been underway for quite some time. This chapter explores the reasons behind Sweden’s position as an important popular music center. In no small part, geographic factors have played a role in this process. These include themes from economic and cultural geography, such as Sweden’s position in the world as a small, cosmopolitan country; the spatial organization of the music industry; and the tendency for even geographic development within Sweden.

Keywords

Music geographySwedish musicSongwritingMusic productionMusic industry

In 2016, the prolific Swedish songwriter and producer Max Martin received the prestigious Polar Prize in Stockholm. Pop dignitaries from around the world praised the choice. Justin Timberlake, Britney Spears, and Adam Levine of the band Maroon 5 called Martin a master, a perfectionist, and obsessed with making music (TV4 Play 2016). Katy Perry continued to say that Martin has a childlike sense of melody, while Simon Cowell of the Idol television show opined, I don’t think Max is human. He was made in Sweden to make hit records (Sveriges Utbildningsradio 2016). During the Polar Prize interview held in front of a live audience, the interviewer, Swedish music journalist Jan Gradvall, added that Martin’s sound is always ahead of the game and that he emphasizes simplicity as the most effective and best method of making music (ibid.).

Anyone who is not a music industry insider may be forgiven for not knowing Max Martin. Besides a series of interviews at the time of the Polar Prize, Max Martin rarely speaks with media and prefers to be a behind-the-scenes person only. But the truth is that Martin is one of the most prolific and commercially successful songwriter–producers in pop history. While maintaining a low profile, he has amassed a record of countless number one hits around the world. In fact, Martin has written more songs that topped the U.S. Billboard list than anybody else in history, except for John Lennon and Paul McCartney. As a producer, Max Martin is second as measured by Billboard hits after George Martin (no relation to Max), the producer of the Beatles (Hunt 2017).

For almost two decades, not just Max Martin, but many other Swedish songwriters and producers have acquired a remarkable degree of global respect. They are the men—and they are almost exclusively men—behind leading pop stars in America and elsewhere. (Other famous pop producers of the early twenty-first century are mainly Americans, such as Pharrell Williams, Dr. Luke, and Timbaland.) Quantifying the import of Swedish writer–producers is not straightforward, but it is common in media to depict Sweden as number one in per capita songwriting, even ahead of the United States and Britain (Mattmar 2013). Such assertions are supported by statistics such as the fact that 25% of the number one hits on the 2014 Billboard chart were written or co-written by Swedes (Gradvall and Åkterman 2017).

Many of the hits by artists like Taylor Swift, Lady Gaga, One Direction, and Katy Perry are connected to Sweden. These artists often travel to Stockholm (which is the hub of the Swedish music cluster) to negotiate, co-write songs, and record. Conversely, Swedish writers and producers operate globally and can be found working in music industry spaces elsewhere, such as in Los Angeles. How did this happen? This monograph explores the roots, longevity, and character of the cluster of songwriters and producers in Sweden. My thinking about this phenomenon is grounded in the perspective that popular music, an important element of the cultural economy, exists in globalized networks. Certainly, there are local factors that can explain why Sweden has played an outsized role in the music industry. For example, Sweden has a long history as a pop country. It is a style long favored by the public, from the radio show Svensktoppen which has for more than 50 years presented a top-10 list to the public every weekend, to the prominence of the Eurovision Song Contest. Ultimately, however, Swedish-derived pop is the product of cultural and personal interconnectedness among multiple nodes around the world. The quote below from the Financial Times, which describes Britney Spears’ 2003 hit Toxic, exemplifies this process:

So, an American singer had a hit with a song written by an Englishwoman and three Swedes, with help from a tune used in an Indian film; the song was recorded in Stockholm and Hollywood, then mixed in Stockholm. This is the way the pop world now works. In the days of Tin Pan Alley and the Brill Building¹, jobbing songwriters would sit around a piano bashing out hits but many of today’s most popular songs are not so much written as constructed, by multinational teams. (Cheal 2015, p. 15)

The constructed part above involve both songwriting and production. Traditionally, writing and production are two separate steps in the music-making process. Today, however, almost all of the individuals scrutinized in this study are considered writer–producers. At least in the world of pop, the two have increasingly merged. The main reason is advances in music-making technology. The role of the producer is to create the sound of a song, which is an integral part of a composition, equally important as lyrics or melody. The writer often has a clear idea of what the sound of a song-in-progress should be like, but in the past, the writer may have presented his composition to artists and record labels in a rudimentary form. Today, laptop-based software allows a writer to quickly and inexpensively record a professional sounding demo. Thus, technology has pushed a new generation of songwriters to learn production technology. On the other hand, somebody that used to be a producer-only now has an economic incentive to be involved in writing as well. In the contemporary music industry, the rights to compositions are more lucrative than the recordings. In other words, writing credits are much more economically advantageous than production credits.

I have written about Swedish music for a number of years, starting with the 2010 article Beyond ABBA: The Globalization of the Swedish Popular Music. There I identified a series of factors that explained the success of Swedish popular music. The article emphasized Swedish performing artists during the 1990s and early 2000s, but for a number of reasons explored in this monograph, Sweden’s role in the global music scene has moved toward production and songwriting. The earlier success of Swedish artists is what I call the Swedish Music Miracle 1.0, using the common metaphor from computer software that are constantly issued in new iterations. In Beyond ABBA, I barely touched upon the importance of the songwriter–producer phenomenon; therefore, this Swedish Music Miracle 2.0 needs to be written.

The 2.0 metaphor is apt as the current Swedish music industry did not emerge out of nowhere; rather, it is built on knowledge, skills, and structures that were put in place during a previous era. One the other hand, the change from 1.0 to 2.0 is not discrete. Swedish artists continue to be popular internationally. Especially female performers such as Tove Lo, Lykke Li, Zara Larsson, and First Aid Kit have been successful recently. In electronic dance music, the Swedish acts Avicii and Swedish House Mafia were central to the global mainstreaming of the genre. Electronic dance music is also an extension of the Swedish DJ community, which, as we will see later, is intertwined with Sweden’s songwriter–producer cluster, again suggesting strong path dependencies in the development of the Swedish music industry.

I also use the term miracle. In part, this is an acquiescence to the tendency in media to use hyperbolic language. The Merriam-Webster (2019) dictionary defines a miracle as an extraordinary event manifesting divine intervention in human affairs. But it also acknowledges a secularization of the concept, as a secondary definition of a miracle is an extremely outstanding or unusual event, thing, or accomplishment. The latter can reasonably be applied to the case of Swedish music.

But hasn’t the topic of Swedish songwriters and producers been covered already? The answer is that a large number of short journalistic accounts are available. Many of those I draw upon in this monograph. To date, the most comprehensive study is the 2015 book The Song Machine: Inside the Hit Factory by the American music journalist John Seabrook. While not solely focused on Sweden, it explores how the Swedish songwriting phenomenon emerged and how it has played a central role in the contemporary pop music landscape. However, no academic research on the topic is yet available. Therefore, my aim is a theoretically informed analysis that supplements media portrayals, yet also a readable narrative that hopefully is of interest to those who are not in academia.

I analyze the Music Miracle 2.0 from three theoretical points of view—Swedish pop music production as (1) an element of the global circulation of music; (2) having acquired a favorable reputation in the global music industry; and (3) a global–local hybrid.

Circulation emphasizes continuous feedback loops to understand the development of music rather than traditional geographic diffusion models where styles of music have a point of origin and spread elsewhere in the world. Circulation instead stresses the important role of networks, both among individuals and through media, which transmit popular culture across space. Within networks of circulation, there are locations that continuously influence the overall system. For example, Swedish songwriter–producers may invent stylistic elements that are adopted elsewhere and continue to circulate.

It is also crucial for an individual to acquire a positive reputation in order to develop a prominent position within the network of global pop music. Reputation is the collective representation of somebody’s actions and results (Fombrun 1996). That representation suggests an ability to deliver value for stakeholders—in this case artists and record labels. Collective representation means that reputation is a social construct where diverse perceptions fuse into a generalized reputation. These perceptions are held by interacting people who quite often know each other. Connecting music circulation and individual reputation, this study explores how contacts and collaboration, as well as information on the best practices of songwriting and production, flow between Sweden and other nodes in the global music network.

Pop music is often imagined as a homogenous product devoid of any local content, as global capitalism searches for cultural expressions that appeal to people irrespective of their geographic, ethnic, or cultural background. However, this is a simplified perspective as music is often a hybrid form of culture that incorporates a divergent set of transnational aesthetics. While circulation in combination with reputation situate the production of Swedish pop music within the global music industry, cultural hybridity—the mixing of cultures in an increasingly globalized world—in combination with circulation emphasize the content of the music.

The structure of the book is as follows. After this introduction, the section The Swedish Music Miracle 1.0 is a history of recent Swedish music that provides an important context to the rest of the book. It specifically spells out background factors that explain the success of Swedish music. The remainder of this chapter is a lightly revised version of my aforementioned article Beyond ABBA: The Globalization of the Swedish Popular Music. Changes are limited to data updates, the omission of some figures, and the occasional fine-tuning of the text so that it works as a monograph chapter rather than a freestanding research article. The chapter text is used by permission of the article copyright holder, the American Geographical Society. Chapter 2 (Local Music in a Global Network: Circulation, Reputation, and Hybridity) introduces the theoretical framework that contextualizes the emergence and the perpetuation of Swedish songwriters and producers. These interconnected theories position Swedish music industry and creativity in global pop music culture. Chapters 3 and 4 contain an analysis of the data material on Swedish writer–producers. Chapter 3 (The Main Players) addresses the people network, both among the Swedish music actors but also the relationship between the Swedish constellation of writer–producers and important agents elsewhere in the global music industry (primarily in the United Stated and Great Britain). Chapter 4 (An Analysis of Swedish Pop Music) focuses specifically on the music and the process by which it took shape. In reality, the analytical distinction between people and the music they produce is somewhat fluid and the reader will notice similarities between the two chapters. Finally, the monograph ends with Concluding Thoughts (Chapter 5) that synthesize the empirical material.

In some ways, this monograph represents a personal deviation. Much of my previous scholarship has focused on rock music, in part because of personal tastes and preferences (e.g., Johansson and Bell 2009; Johansson 2013; Johansson and Bell 2014; Johansson et al. 2016). However, virtually all the music covered herein is unabashedly commercial pop. Initially, this new emphasis presented a problem as I was not well versed in top-40 pop beyond incidental exposure and the vagaries of daily life. Enter early teenager. Chauffeuring a daughter—equipped with a smartphone, a Spotify app, and a propensity to quiz her father about all the latest hits—back and forth from daily athletic practices has been a learning experience. With a reasonably good batting average, I can now tell the styles and sounds of One Direction, Katy Perry, and Ariana Grande apart. Without that assistance, it is doubtful that I could have completed this monograph.

The Swedish Music Miracle 1.0

In the minds of most people, music from Sweden is synonymous with the 1970s mega band ABBA. Careful observers of popular music know, however, that more recently Swedish artists have achieved both artistic acclaim and commercial success around the world. During the last three decades Sweden has become a force to be reckoned with in pop and rock music. This section explores the reasons behind Sweden’s position as a popular music center. In no small part, geographic factors have played a role in this process. These include themes from cultural and economic geography, including Sweden’s place in the world as a small, outward-oriented country; the spatial arrangement of the music industry, both in Sweden and globally; and the propensity for geographic egalitarianism within Sweden.

Sweden had its musical moments before ABBA. A quirky, 1960s instrumental band called the Spotniks was popular both in Europe and Japan, and the band Blue Swede scored a number one hit single in the United States with Hooked on a Feeling in 1974. But such forays into the world of pop paled in comparison to ABBA, who won the Eurovision Song Contest in 1974 with the song Waterloo. (The band’s time capsule Eurovision stage appearance is available on YouTube.) That emblematic song was followed by an unprecedented string of worldwide hits until their final album in 1981. Subsequent ABBA revivals, especially via musicals and films like Mamma Mia, Muriel’s Wedding, and The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert have solidified their songs (e.g., Dancing Queen; Fernando; Money, Money, Money; and The Winner Takes It All) as bedrocks of the popular music canon.

After ABBA, a new generation of Swedish artists made it to the global music scene. To begin, Sweden shares some of the responsibility for the hairspray-and-spandex heavy metal music that was popular in the 1980s; the band Europe scored a hit with The Final Countdown in 1986. Two years later, Neneh Cherry helped making rap more mainstream with Buffalo Stance. A more sustained effort, nineteen Top-40 hit singles in the U.K., for example, was accomplished by Roxette from 1988 onward. The Look, Listen to Your Heart, and It Must Have Been Love are stand-outs in the group’s pop-rock repertoire. More blatantly using associations with ABBA (see Hartshorne 2003), the two men and two women formula of Ace of Base took The Sign to number one on Billboard in 1994. That same year Rednex capitalized on a concoction of Euro disco and American folk tradition and introduced Cotton Eye Joe on the world. And in 1996, the indie band The Cardigans engaged in what had become a Swedish national sport—occupying the top spot on the U.S. singles chart—with the enduring song Lovefool. (The band’s guitar player Peter Svensson later became an important songwriter for numerous global pop artists.)

Data from various economic indicators, such as royalties and albums sold, indicate that the Swedish Music Miracle 1.0 started circa 1990 and continued uninterrupted until 2003 (Export Music Sweden 2006). The Swedish government took notice and outlined the music industry in an official report (Forss 1999) noting that the music export per capita was higher in Sweden than in Great Britain, Australia, Denmark, or Ireland. Royalty payments from foreign markets were twice the U.S. per capita figure. The notion of Sweden as the third largest exporter of popular music after the United States and the U.K. became a mantra in the description of the country’s music industry success (Hallencreutz et al. 2004). Revenue from abroad came primarily from the two top markets, the United States and the U.K. (Lofthus 2002),² but Swedish record labels have successfully targeted the significant Japanese market. For example, Japanese indie pop fans responded favorably to a band like the Cardigans as they reportedly loved their straightforward melodies, coming from a place they imagine to be clean and populated by nice people (see STIM-nytt 1997; Bergendal 1998). In truth, the music industry probably never accounted for more than 0.5% of Sweden’s overall exports in