As it’s the 50th anniversary year of ABBA’s win at the Eurovision Song Contest, I checked out Channel 5’s documentary on the subject.
There was a lot I already knew from having visited ABBA the Museum in the summer, where one exhibit celebrated the milestone.
As I wrote in Lucire, the pre-ABBA world for the individual members seemed foreign to me, having made my first visit to the country in 2002. As the 1970s dawned, the programme explained, Sweden was affluent, and the music industry looked to London, which had become a global hub. If you could make it there, you were propelled to international stardom.
For me, it’s easy to connect with Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus’s thinking that it wasn’t enough to be big at home, which they were. ABBA’s early hits did well in Sweden. But they wanted international success, and pursued it single-mindedly.
An unsuccessful bid to become the Eurovision Song Contest entry for 1973 meant that the band, and producer Stig Anderson, were laser-focused for 1974.
Once they got to Brighton for the ’74 final, ‘Waterloo’ was the only song that was in the pop–rock genre, while the competitors stayed with the tried-and-tested (and by now, dull) ballads that had been successful in previous years. A lesson in differentiation and branding.
The rest, as they say, is history.
In business, I never saw the point, if you have a product that can travel easily (for example, software, which is a weightless export, or similar forms of intellectual capital), of pursuing a domestic-only strategy. ABBA clearly saw it the same way.
It might be buoyed by my father, who was a big believer in exports generating foreign exchange for a country. He would have made an excellent economist or even a finance minister as he frequently saw these macroeconomic views. When you hear about the subject at home, some of it sunk in.
The fact that no one had published digital fonts in Aotearoa New Zealand before meant that I had to look offshore to sell my products, too. (The country remained in denial well into the 1990s and maintained the belief this could only be done by foreigners.)
What I did wasn’t on the scale of ABBA, but I feel the quest to generate exports was similar. You need to be single-minded about it, and not be dissuaded by the immediate comfort of home sales. In my case, I barely had any anyway, so my decision was made far easier. But in their case, they could have been a successful local group—but exporting made them superstars. Finding the most viral route to go global—in those days, Eurovision—meant that ABBA remains in our consciousness even today.
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