AMB in Times Magazine - Academy of Music and Business

The Culture
Music
Building a Better Pop Song. How
Sweden re-engineered the world’s music
By Lisa Abend
linn jans has seen the future. seated in a
lecture hall at Sweden’s brand-new Academy
of Music and Business (AMB), the 16-year-old
listened raptly as Jonah Nilsson sat at the piano,
tossed back his bangs and broke into a song—part
Stevie Wonder, part Michael Jackson—that sent
chills down her spine. Jans had never heard of
Nilsson until a few days before he appeared at her
school, but as she learned what was in store for the
26-year-old performer’s band—a contract with one
of Sweden’s most important producers, a record
deal with Universal, a U.S. tour and all the fame
and fortune she imagined coming with it—she
had no problem understanding his newfound success. “He’s going to be the next Justin Bieber,” she
gushed, then paused. “But I think I could be too.”
That’s not the outlandish claim it first appears
to be. As one of the members of AMB’s inaugural
class, Jans—who sings, plays piano and writes
her own songs—is getting a uniquely well­tailored education in the finer points of making
it in the pop industry. And more to the point, she
is part of a group, ­simply by virtue of her nationality, that is currently the music business’s
stealthiest success story. Consider the numbers.
In 2011, Sweden had $135 million in foreign music sales, making it the world’s largest exporter
of pop music per capita and the third largest in
absolute terms, after the U.S. and U.K.
Ever since Abba burst onto the global pop
scene in 1974, with their go-go boots and intentions of becoming Scandinavia’s Beach Boys,
the country has periodically lobbed up notable
pop acts: Ace of Base, Roxette, the Cardigans and
the Hives all had moments at or near the top of
the charts. But now seems to be something of a
golden age. Two years ago Swedish House Mafia
became the first electronic group to perform at—
and sell out—­Madison Square Garden. Coming
off a summer-long gig at Ibiza’s always jammed
Ushuaia club, Avicii is currently ranked the
third-best DJ in the world by DJ Magazine; he was
also nominated for Best Dance Recording at this
year’s Grammy Awards. In 2012 that honor fell to
Robyn, who was also nominated for Best Dance/
Electronica Album.
But the two young women of Icona Pop are
perhaps having the biggest moment. Stockholm
natives Aino Jawo and Caroline Hjelt play an in56
fectious brand of electro-dance music with
enough riot-grrrl backbone to make it a favorite
among young women everywhere. A spot last
year on the HBO series Girls juiced sales of their
first single, “I Love It.” By June it had gone double
platinum and was ubiquitous at every dance club
and frat party in the country. “A few weeks ago
we were in New York and got to go out for the
first time in a while,” says Jawo. “And at every
club we went to, they played ‘I Love It.’ That’s
when I thought, O.K., maybe we’ve made it.”
Jonah Nilsson seeks that same kind of breakthrough. A literal choirboy—his first music gig
was at his church—he formed a band in 2009
with school buddies. But unlike the front men of
most boy bands, Nilsson had a keen interest in
understanding how songs work—and the talent
to make them his own. So much talent that
when the band, christened Dirty Loops, posted a
YouTube video of themselves playing a jazzinflected­version of Lady Gaga’s “Just Dance,” the
response was what counts as overwhelming in
Sweden: 5,000 hits within the first few days. “I
have YouTube to thank for everything,” Nilsson
says. “Until then, we were just typical teenagers
who wanted to be left alone in the basement.”
The YouTube splash brought a call from superstar producer and songwriter Andreas Carlsson,
who co-wrote “Bye Bye Bye” for ’N Sync. Carlsson
flew the group to Los Angeles, where Nilsson impressed Quincy Jones and producer David Foster.
Carlsson told Foster, “It’s going to be sweaty for
Timberlake after this kid comes out.”
Now views of some of Dirty Loops’ covers have
topped 3 million, and Nilsson is preparing for
what’s to come. “I want to do it all—go out on
tour, play the big arenas, produce, maybe write
music for movies,” he says. “And once I’ve done all
that, I’d like to go back and write choir music.”
That’s the charming thing about Swedes: even
their pop stars’ ambitions never seem obvious
or insatiable. That ingrained aversion to standing out (in Swedish, it’s called jantelagen) may
explain why the most influential Swedes in pop
­music—and they are legion—are hardly household names. But behind the scenes, Shellback,
­RedOne, Bloodshy and Avant, and the great Max
Martin are responsible for a disproportionately
large number of pop hits from the past decade or
Set design by Vault49 for TIME
1. justin bieber
Swede Max Martin co-wrote
and co-produced Biebs’ Top 5
hit “Beauty and a Beat”
2. robyn
The Swedish diva scored a
Grammy nomination for her
song “Dancing on My Own”
3. abba
The first worldwide Swedish
pop phenomenon—380 million sold and counting
4. taylor swift
Martin and Shellback produced “We Are Never Ever
Getting Back Together”
5. katy perry
Martin had a hand in hits
“Roar,” “I Kissed a Girl”
and “California Gurls”
6. swedish house mafia
First electronic-dance-­
music act to sell out
Madison Square Garden
7. usher
“DJ Got Us Fallin’ in Love”
and “Scream” were produced
by Martin and Shellback
8. avicii
The Swedish DJ’s “Wake
Me Up” hit No. 1 in 22 countries and No. 4 in the U.S.
9. icona pop
“I Don’t Care” became a
hit song of the summer,
thanks to HBO’s Girls
10. lady gaga
RedOne co-wrote and
produced “Bad Romance”
and “Poker Face”
1
10
2
9
5
7
3
8
4
6
The Culture
Budding Britney First-year student
Ella Lundemo performs at Sweden’s
new Academy of Music and Business
58
Music
He was involved in 7 of the 10 most performed pop songs in 2012. His latest masterwork, ­Perry’s “Roar,” which he
co-wrote and produced, hit No. 1 on the
Billboard Hot 100.
There’s no single explanation for how
Swedish songwriters and producers
keep turning out hits. For Ola Hakansson, who started his career in the 1960s
with Ola and the Janglers—the first
Swedish band to hit the U.S. Billboard
charts—it comes down to a kind of ingrained adaptability. “We’re a small
country, so we can’t set any trends,” says
Hakansson, who now manages Icona
Pop. “But we’re really good at picking up
on other people’s, and we’re really good
at mimicking.” Musically, he notes,
American pop is rooted in jazz and
‘We can’t set any trends,
but we’re really good at
picking up on other
people’s and really good
at mimicking.’
—ola hakansson, swedish pop star
and manager
blues, while European music is based
more firmly on keyboards. “What we do
in Sweden is to mix the jazz and blues
with the keyboards,” he says. “If you listen to Abba, that’s what they did. Groups
­today are still at it.”
Others point to an older influence.
“You hear that?” Carlsson asks, playing
the unmistakable opening notes of
­Abba’s “Dum Dum Diddle.” “That’s a
hook you’ll never hear anywhere else.
That’s straight from Swedish folk music,
which is very melodic.”
Another potent explanation for Sweden’s pop juggernaut comes from that
most indigenously Scandinavian of
things: the welfare state. Publicly funded
arts councils give money to artists, venues and labels for recording, touring and
even living e­ xpenses. The nurturing of
musical talent begins even earlier. Children take mandatory music-appreciation
classes in kindergarten, and cities run
kulturskolan, which offer low-fee afterschool programs for children that include
music lessons and instrument rentals.
Earlier this year, Sweden opened its
own music Hall of Fame, which includes
an Abba museum. But the future of the
burgeoning pop industry may lie in the
newly created Academy of Music and
Business. Founded by Carlsson and his
former music teacher, Magnus Lundin, in
their hometown of Tingsryd, the school
opened Aug. 24. As a gymnasium—a kind
of advanced high school—it receives
¤13,000 annually from the Swedish government for each of its 46 current students. (It expects to have 240 within three
years.) “We’re standing in front of enormous changes in the music industry, and
the industry itself doesn’t know how to
prepare musicians,” says Lundin. “That’s
where we come in.”
The school is also a step toward institutionalizing the phenomenon that began
spontaneously in Cheiron Studios two decades ago. On the day that Jonah Nilsson
visited AMB, Carlsson came with him and
delivered a lecture about the songwriting
process. For Linn Jans, his talk was just as
inspiring as Nilsson’s performance. “Sweden is so little and America is so big,” she
said afterward. “I really want to be famous
in America.” —with r­ eporting by carl
n
­r einholdtzon ­b elfrage
time December 9, 2013
pre v ious page : gett y images (10); this page : E mily B ednar
so. ­Lady Gaga, Celine ­Dion, ’N Sync, Kelly
Clarkson,­­Britney Spears, Pink, Katy
­Perry, M
­ aroon 5: every single one of them
has had a hit—more often quite a few—­
written and produced by Swedes.
The man credited with starting this
trend is Dag Volle, a.k.a. Denniz Pop. He
discovered Ace of Base in the early ’90s,
when the band’s demo cassette got stuck
in his car stereo. After being forced to listen to the same song over and over, he realized he couldn’t get it out of his head.
(He would retitle it “All That She Wants.”)
He and a partner later opened Cheiron
Studios and got their big break when a
group of five young Americans walked in
to record their first album and walked
out as the Backstreet Boys.
Until his death in 1998, Volle worked
collaboratively, bringing in young songwriters and mentoring them. It was he
who recognized Max Martin, perhaps the
most talented—and still the most
­prolific—of Nordic music men. Martin
(real­name: Martin Karl Sandberg) has
since written an astonishing string of
hits, including Spears’ “Baby One More
Time,” Clarkson’s “Since U Been Gone”
and Usher’s “DJ Got Us Fallin’ in Love.”
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