In 2014 — the only year I have the exact numbers for — 25 percent of the songs that climbed to the top 10 in the US were written or co-written by Swedish songwriters. Over the past decade as whole, the number is somewhere between 10 and 20 percent. No country comes close to exporting as much music in relation to the size of its economy.
The main drivers of revenue are the big pop acts, ABBA and Roxette, and a stable of songwriters who write for The Weeknd, Taylor Swift, Coldplay, Nicky Minaj, Ed Sheeran, and a large share of other acts that have been on the top of the charts over the last three decades.
But the unusual success of Swedish music is not constrained to mainstream pop; it cuts across genres. Sweden has had an outsized influence on death metal (with bands such as In Flames, Meshuggah, and Opeth), house (Avicii, Swedish House Mafia, Alesso), indie music (Lykke Li, José Gonzales, Robyn), and so on and on.
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What is a scene? It is a group of people who are producing work in public but aimed at each other. The metal bands in Karlshamn, where Schuster grew up, were a scene. They performed on stage — but the audience was mainly their friends who played in other bands. If they were anything like the other local scenes I’ve seen, they challenged and supported each other to be bolder, more ambitious, better. A scene, to borrow a phrase from Visakan Veerasamy, “is a group of people who unblock each other at an accelerating rate”.
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It was not done intentionally. Rather, it was an accidental side-effect of two political projects that were subverted by the grassroots: the Swedish public music education program and the study circle movement.
From the article:
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