- Book author
- Martin Knust
Using interviews with and academic studies of the careers of internationally-famous music producers and music industry professionals from Småland, Sweden, this open access book studies the history and present state of pop music production and entrepreneurship. An exceptionally high number of established and emerging pop artists and producers from this region of Sweden have had significant success on the international stage. This book describes how the situation for music producers and artists from Småland has changed during the past 50 years or so, starting in the 1970s with the so-called ‘Swedish music wonder’ and ending with the situation contemporary artists and entrepreneurs are facing. The field has changed massively both in terms of technology (from analogue to digital), social production (from individual productions to collective projects), distribution and marketing (from selling concert tickets and LPs to creating “prosuming” fanbases and multipronged careers considering genres, venues and activities). This book will be of interest to students of and professionals in music production; music, economy and media scholars; readers active in creative industries; and fans of (Swedish) pop music.
Pop Music Made in Småland: Introduction
This volume will describe and analyse the state of the art in pop music production today and its historical background. As an example, we chose pop music production and entrepreneurship in rural Småland, in South Sweden. Many of the established pop artists and producers who were born and raised there have an international career. Our study will describe how the situation for music producers and artists from Småland has changed during the past 50 years or so, starting in the 1970s and ending with the situation contemporary artists and entrepreneurs are facing. Genres, venues and activities have changed massively in terms of technology (from analogue to digital), social production (from individual productions to collective projects), distribution and marketing (from selling concert tickets and LPs to creating prosuming fanbases and multipronged careers).
We will present our research results by combining the primary and secondary materials. The primary material consists of the voices of business insiders, and the secondary consists of those of academics with a specialization in popular music research. The book will be divided into 12 chapters which alternately present (a) six interviews with an artist/producer from which we will gain knowledge about their artistic working routines and business models, among other things, and (b) six essays, written by one or several music researchers that focus on aspects that are highlighted
in the preceding interview. The 12 chapters will deal with the following questions:
- How is a pop song created?
- How is a pop song created with other creators?
- What role does technology play in the creation of music?
- What role does technology play in marketing strategies designed for music?
- What new types of music entrepreneurship emerged as a result of digitalization being introduced?
- How important is the geographical location where the production of music happens and where an artist is based?
- How do music producers become experts in their profession?
- How did the pandemic affect music production?
- What are the legal frames for music production and how do they affect it?
Sweden has a strong standing as a pop-producing and pop-exporting nation. Ever since ABBA won the Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) in 1974, Swedish pop producers, whose work is often not discussed much abroad, have established themselves internationally as reliable hit writers, such as the exceptionally successful Max Martin (born 1971), whose songs are topping the international charts for more than 30 years. It is this kind of music that we will address in this volume. In research, “pop” is often used synonymously with “popular music” (e.g. in Schütte 2021), embracing a wide range of genres like folk, hip-hop and rock.1 It is the latter two genres which have been primarily investigated in music research, as well as various “indie” genres, probably thanks to the Birmingham School’s focus on so-called subcultures (Bjurström 2005, 71–137). Mainstream pop has not been researched as often. According to Thomas Hecken, the generic term “pop” is not firmly established in musicology yet (Hecken and Kleiner 2017, 44) and the genre is characterized by a group of features that sets it apart from more alternative genres or subgenres: it is commercial, technologically innovative, avoids stylistic extremes, needs a hook, is easy to remember, is standardized, is conservative and implemented top-down; it is artificial, non-authentic, aesthetically sophisticated, devoted to trends, superficial, non-aggressive and connotated to the female contrary to rock which is perceived as a masculine genre (Hecken and Kleiner 2017, 46–51; Longhurst and Bogdanović 2005, 118–127). Other aspects could be added that are visible in two songs that were written by two of our interviewees. The first is “Runaway (U & I)”, performed by the artist duo Galantis and written by the Swedish music producer Julia Karlsson. It was released in 2015 and became one of the major hits that year. The other song is “Little Something”, performed by Melody Gardot and Sting, written by Hilda Stenmalm and released in 2020. Both songs are influenced by other music genres—the latter by Latin and the former by house/EDM. They both have a strict form that consists of a verse, a pre-chorus and a chorus, the lyrics are in English and, despite some melancholic sections and undertones, the tone or mood of these songs as a whole is positive, and in the chorus of “Runaway (U & I)” is upbeat and motivational. The videos of these songs—the “Runaway (U & I)” video is on the YouTube channel of the Swedish electronic music duo Galantis, and “Little Something” can be found on the YouTube channel BBC Music—show the personae who perform the vocals of the songs; in the case of Galantis, there is a self-referential spoken intro about the personae of famous people and a mask behind a mask, which is a symbol for the difference and overlapping of person and persona. The appearance of the performers and their environment is elegant but not extravagant. Finally, a certain gender neutrality can be observed. Both songs have two vocal performers, one male and one female, and their voices mix in different ways, both synchronously and consecutively. These features can be seen as typical of contemporary pop. We hope that this volume will help to paint a clearer image of this genre.
Like the empirical material we will examine, the research literature and traditions we will refer to are mostly European, that is, mainly Continental and Northern European. To explore the creative process, both musicological and music educational research will be employed. What follows next is an outline of the content of the six essays; the participants and the contents of the six interviews will be presented in a separate introduction written by Göran Nikolausson that will appear after this preface.
The first and last essays of this volume, which have been written by Martin Knust, form a thematic bracket; they appear before and after the interviews with our oldest and our youngest interviewee respectively. The volume as a whole can be read as a chronologically structured overview about pop music production, starting with composition in former centuries and ending with an opinion what the future may look like. The essay in Chap. 2, “The Creation of Music: A Historical Overview of the Composition Process”, introduces a historical perspective on the research about the creative strategies of music producers. The models and approaches used to evaluate their working methods have been derived
from musicological research about composers’ creative processes. The final essay, in Chap. 12, “Evolution and Selection: Analogue Remnants, Traces and Echoes in Digital Music”, takes a critical look at the musicscape of today and focuses on the questions of to what extent analogue still matters in the digital era, how digitalization has affected the production of music and what legal and aesthetic paradoxes are the results of this transition that will shape future song production. The essay in Chap. 4, “From Novice to Expert: Creative Processes in the Music Studio and Classroom”, written by Anna Linge, Klas Mattiasson and Göran Nikolausson, takes its point of departure from music education research and explores the questions of how entrepreneurial professionalism is achieved in music production and how it can be mediated and explored in a productive manner in schools. The essay in Chap. 6, “What have I done? On Artistic Freedom, Authenticity and the Identification of Music, from Movable Type Print to Copyright and Digital Fingerprints”, written by Maria Eriksson and Ulrik Volgsten, puts the legal frames surrounding music in focus, which means first and foremost considering copyright in music and how it defines historically and today what is perceived to be music. The essay in Chap. 8, “The Relationship Between Swedish Music Producers and Music Consumers During the Past 50 Years”, written by Jan-Olof Gullö, gives an overview of the changes in the Swedish pop music business since the days of ABBA and how the introduction of new media has reshaped the relation between music producers and consumers. The essay in Chap. 10, “Digitalization and the Long Tail: Perspectives of Music Producers from Småland”, written by Mischa van Kan, presents the new possibilities that digitalization introduced for the distribution of music that was created by new and unknown music producers and how digitalization has changed the music market.
This volume is not the first overview of the Swedish popular music scene. It is intended to complement the book Made in Sweden. Studies in Popular Music, ed. Björnberg and Bossius 2017, both thematically and methodologically. The historical overview provided in Made in Sweden ends in the 1990s and only contains one interview—or conversation— with a prominent singer/songwriter. In addition, most of the chapters focus on minor genres and subgenres that have national relevance rather than on the broad range of international mainstream pop. Our aim was to give a voice to practitioners in the music business who are active in this segment as much as to researchers of music and music education. Music producers work literally behind the scenes, and neither music researchers nor music amateurs know much about them. The performers of pop songs are not usually their creators too; performers often commission someone to write songs for them or have songs pitched to them by professional songwriters. These songwriters move in a field that is governed by various legal, entrepreneurial, aesthetic, medial and technological imperatives which are permanently subject to change. Our presentation is a documentation of the current situation, that is, of the reality of a fully digitalized music market that has been in the making since the 1990s and has undergone substantial technological transformations until recently. Besides addressing more universal topics like music creativity, expertise and professionalism, technology and law, we will consider two questions that are only relevant because of the time period when this investigation was conducted. The years of the COVID-19 pandemic forced music producers to adjust their business models and working methods. The result of this in pop music production was a complete digitalization of the data transfer and collaborations between the different producers, which had been the norm in other music branches, such as music for film and other media, for a while (cf. Chap. 9). We wanted to know whether this change of working routines has had a lasting effect on the music business, and in particular whether it led to a decentralization of production, as it did in the film music industry. Pop is certainly a global phenomenon, but we were curi- ous to find out whether perhaps some national—or even regional—traces could be found in music that is created by people who have a strong connection to the region of Småland.
This volume documents a particular point in history and can thus serve as a base for future research. At the same time, we wanted to address a large circle of readers, first and foremost those who are learning to become music producers, but also those readers who are interested in pop music and how it is made.
We must thank the Kamprad Family Foundation for Entrepreneurship, Research & Charity for its exceptionally generous support for our research project. Moreover, we would like to thank Dr Karin Martensen, Berlin, and our faculty colleagues at the Department of Music and Art and at the research centre for Intermedial and Multimodal Studies (IMS) at Linnæus University for feedback, input and discussion.
Växjö, 27 February 2025
Växjö, Sweden Martin Knust
