Money, money, money! Abba’s Bjorn Ulvaeus on his fight for fair pay for musicians

Money, money, money! Abba’s Bjorn Ulvaeus on his fight for fair pay for musicians

The Swedish singer-songwriter star tells Ed Potton about the band’s first new tracks in nearly 40 years and getting songwriters a fairer deal

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Ed Potton

Saturday April 17 2021, 12.01am BST, The Times

 My Zoom call with Björn Ulvaeus is on the first day of the school holidays so I apologise in case a small boy wanders into the room. “No need to apologise for that!” the ABBA legend says from his sitting room in Stockholm. He’s used to children running around the place. “I had the Moderna jab a fortnight ago so I had the whole family over at Easter — 18 of them and eight are grandchildren. It’s funny that we feel the need to excuse ourselves for that. Isn’t it the most natural thing in the world?”

We’re only a minute into our interview and the Swedish-stereotype bingo is going brilliantly: Ulvaeus is wholesome, reasonable, relaxed, unshowy. Sweden’s superstars, like their royals, are less ostentatious than ours. Yet a superstar he most definitely is. He has sold 385 million records worldwide, had eight consecutive No 1 albums in the UK from 1973 to 1981 and written a string of songs with Benny Andersson that are part of us, like those of the Beatles and Elvis Presley. SOS, Dancing Queen, Mamma Mia, Super Trouper — Ulvaeus says that people have been turning to them on streaming services even more over the past year. He’s a bit of an aficionado on digital music, having just published a report on what can be done to fix some of its iniquities — more of which later.

He looks in good nick for 75: slim, neat beard, generous helping of hair. It comes as little surprise that lockdown has been pretty bearable chez Ulvaeus, whose net worth is an estimated £220 million. “To be honest, I haven’t noticed too much of it,” he says. Living on a private island helps on that front. “I’ve been at my summer house, which is isolated out in the archipelago.” On the mainland, he adds, “grocery stores have been open, people have been walking around the streets, some of them in masks”. He admits, though, that the country’s initial herd immunity strategy “didn’t work” and that it was “really bad, not being able to see the family”.

Gothenburg-born Ulvaeus has four grown-up children, all of whom live near by. Linda, 48, a singer and actress, and Christian, 43, a musician, are from his nine-year marriage to Agnetha Fältskog of ABBA. That ended in 1980, the year before their other bandmates, Andersson and Anni-Frid Lyngstad, got divorced and two years before the band split. Ulvaeus’s divorce from Fältskog was amicable, he says. There was no loser standing small. “We are really, really good friends and we see each other quite often, actually, on birthdays and Christmas and stuff like that.”

He also has two daughters, Emma, 39, and Anna, 34, with his second wife, the music journalist Lena Källersjö, whom he married in 1981 and, he claimed recently, still has sex with four times a week. Swedish to his boots. Other than that, Ulvaeus has been spending lockdown kayaking, reading, writing a circus-themed stage musical about Pippi Longstocking and planning ABBA’s “avatar” tour, which will feature “lifelike” versions of the band in their satin-clad 1970s pomp. It has been pushed back to 2022, partly because of the pandemic and partly to perfect the technology of the “Abbatars” — presumably holographic but he won’t say any more.

The tour will be accompanied by at least five new songs, their first in almost 40 years, two of which will be called I Still Have Faith in You and Don’t Shut Me Down. “Being together in the studio again, it was so familiar,” Ulvaeus says. “It all came rushing back in seconds.” The same jokes? “Not necessarily the same jokes but, yes, jokes. We had fun. You have to have fun.” Fältskog and Lyngstad sing at a slightly lower pitch these days, he says. “I think their voices are about one tone lower, perhaps. It still sounds very much ABBA.”

There has also been much earnest plotting on his part about the future of the music business. His report, Rebalancing the Song Economy, which he produced with MIDiA, a Britain-based media analysis company, suggests ways in which songwriters can be more fairly rewarded in the streaming era.

“Before corona started I knew that songwriters were in a bad place in the music industry,” Ulvaeus says. “But there was much more focus on it once artists couldn’t do live gigs and they found out what it was like to live from streaming, as a lot of songwriters already did. I firmly believe that the song fuels the whole music industry, and more than ever.”

Research commissioned for the report found that 60 per cent of people thought the song mattered more than the artist, with 29 per cent saying the opposite. “The big artists have their followers and their fans, obviously, but the big picture of streaming is that people pick songs. Yet the songwriter is on the periphery, earning six to ten per cent perhaps of the whole cake. And I think that’s odd.”

Surely it’s not a problem for someone as minted as he is? “Well, as a songwriter I feel for those people out there who try to make careers. Also I was talked into becoming president of CISAC [the International Confederation of Societies of Authors and Composers]. So as president it’s my duty to help songwriters. But it comes from the heart really.

“If you actually have the income, it gives you creative freedom, the ability to tell people, ‘F*** off. I’m not ready yet.’ That’s what Benny Andersson and I did when money came pouring in after we had won the Eurovision Song Contest [with Waterloo in 1974]. Before that we’d been in a rat race, we’d been producing other people, writing songs for other people and touring, and suddenly we just said no to everything and we started writing nine to five, every day.”

About 80 per cent of streaming royalties generally go to the owners of master recordings and he sympathises with Taylor Swift, who has been rerecording her old albums after losing control over her masters. “Probably when she was young she signed an agreement where she didn’t have complete control over her compositions. And her compositions could have ended up, not in Marlboro commercials, but you know what I mean. With ABBA we had control over our music We did one commercial [for a Japanese electronics manufacturer] and that was in 1976.”

One of the reasons songwriters struggle to earn a living, he thinks, is the trend for songs to be written by big teams. That formula has been used by his compatriot, the pop writer-producer Max Martin. “There’s nothing wrong with it, and sometimes the most wonderful songs come out of that,” Ulvaeus says. “But if that’s all there is, it’s very difficult for one of those people to become a whole songwriter if all they do is just one niche of the song.”

He compares that with his partnership with Andersson. “Then it comes from the heart in a different way. The way Billie Eilish and her brother works, that is genuine, they are works of art.” Which other songwriters does he admire? “Taylor Swift, obviously, and Madonna in the beginning. Elton John and Bernie Taupin, Lennon and McCartney,” he says. “If you have 15 people on it, it becomes more of a product. Even if the product is very attractive. The artists can be replaced very easily if you just look at the artist as a vehicle.”

The report compares streaming-led songs to fast food: geared towards instant satisfaction, with low nutritional value and highly addictive. What does that make ABBA — steak? He laughs. “I hadn’t thought about that but certainly people use music as functional much more than before.” He distinguishes between proactive “lean forward” listening and passive radio-style “lean-back” listening. Original compositions should, he thinks, be valued more highly than the bland acoustic wallpaper that dominates Spotify playlists. He wants higher subscription rates for streaming services, some of which haven’t risen for more than ten years, metered charges that vary with the amount of music consumed and for labels to invest in in-house songwriters.

Ulvaeus emphasises that “we’re not attacking anyone. I think streaming is the future and I absolutely love it. It’s just that the ecosystem is slightly dysfunctional.” Will people listen? Has he, for example, spoken to Daniel Ek, the Swedish boss of Spotify? “Yes, he’s a neighbour actually. I have discussed the fan-centric v user-centric licence subscription model with him, and metadata in general.” I picture the guests at a swish Stockholm barbecue edging away from Ulvaeus and Ek as they embark on a streaming geek-out.

I shouldn’t poke fun. Ulvaeus is a passionate and eloquent spokesman for songwriters, and also for his less media-friendly bandmates. “I’ve been speaking about different things in the media, more than the others perhaps,” he says, although all four agree on their aversion to playing live. “None of us is keen to go on tour, and we never were really. We had a ten-year career, and out of that we may have toured six months.”

He prefers using their music to tell stories, as it does in Mamma Mia! the stage musical, the two subsequent films and Mamma Mia! The Party, the interactive hen-party magnet that returns to the O2 arena in London in October. “And now the avatars is another story on another level,” he says. Will it be weird to see a virtual version of his young self on stage? “I’m sure it will.”

The new songs will feature lyrics by Ulvaeus and music by Andersson, whom he has known since the 1960s, when they were in different Swedish bands. “During the Abba years we worked together with the music and then I would write the words afterwards,” he says. “But Benny was always the musical genius and I was the word man, so it’s a natural development.”

They have been collaborating in a similar way on the Pippi Longstocking musical, Ulvaeus says. His idea was to have Pippi, the super-strong girl created by Astrid Lindgren, “come to the circus, with real circus artists, and do all the tricks better than the artists”. The plan is to launch the show in Sweden and then take it overseas: Germany, the UK and America.

The English version Ulvaeus will write himself, of course. It still staggers how someone working in their second language could have written lyrics as compelling as those in Super Trouper, One of Us and The Winner Takes It All. “I started reading English books very early, and even more so when we started with Abba. I wasn’t as good in the beginning but I became better and better and suddenly in the latter half of our career I could think in English,” he says. “For pop music it’s easier to write in English. It’s more flexible and there are many more words to choose from.”

It’s what you do with them that counts, though. And nobody puts words to music like Björn Ulvaeus.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/money-money-money-abbas-bjorn-ulvaeus-on-his-fight-for-fair-pay-for-musicians-2hv55rd9w