Economic success
Marketing
A major factor in ABBA's international breakthrough was first of all their victory in the 1974 Eurovision Song Contest, which made the group and its simple but distinctive band name ABBA internationally famous virtually overnight. At the same time, they conveyed a new, modern image through their song Waterloo and the unusual, shrill costumes, which was predominantly judged positively by the European audience. The two singers Fältskog and Lyngstad, who were two completely different but equally attractive and likeable types of women and appeared with a fresh and positive charisma, contributed to this. For years ABBA cultivated the image of two happy and very good friends, who without the usual scandals like love affairs, drug use etc. always appeared nice and friendly in public, at TV shows and towards their fans. And even after the separation of Fältskog and Ulvaeus, the four musicians presented themselves as a group that worked together for a music project despite personal differences.
While many bands in the early 1970s were still playing music inspired by the popular English rock music of the 1960s, ABBA was striving to produce more modern, catchy and commercially successful light music. After ABBA experimented with very different musical styles on their first records - from the glam rock number Rock Me to the international hit song Honey, Honey - the group found their own and previously unproduced pop sound with their third album ABBA in 1975. Supported by a versatile choice of instruments, modern arrangements and sophisticated studio technology, which was very elaborate compared to many other pop and disco musicians of their time, ABBA achieved a very high standard of quality, both in music recording and production. The group also had a very good sense for the selection of singles and their releases, as well as for the further development of their music. Only if a song seemed "promising" to the production team, it was released. Especially the songs that were released as singles before a new album were very demanding for the ABBA team. But also the later singles had to have "hit level".
In the course of a global marketing strategy, the ABBA management around Stig Anderson from the first Greatest Hits album at the end of 1975 onwards focused on releases as uniform as possible, but again and again different titles, singles and albums - as already at the beginning of their career - were recorded and released very country-specific. Thus, there are many titles that were sung in different languages, divergent titles on the B-sides of the singles as well as many special productions and compilation albums for individual countries. In addition, the band had a high media presence in the countries that were most important to them commercially. The group gave countless interviews and appeared live on major television programs and music shows to promote new songs and albums. They also used the medium of the music video more than almost any other group. In parallel, the group performed on worldwide tours in 1977 and 1979 with elaborate stage and spotlight shows, which was known in this dimension only from very few artists.
Several factors mainly contributed to the success on a compositional level: firstly, the syllabic style, i.e. one note per lyric syllable in each song. Secondly, the correspondence between text content and song structure (text structure = song structure). Thirdly, the very well-balanced proportion of melody or syllable notes to rests and instrumental sections in most songs. Fourthly, a melodic design with simple and small tonal intervals without chromatic tones, so that the overall result is an almost folksong-like, particularly singable, easy-to-follow song in which the vocal melody already contains the underlying harmonic framework completely or to a large extent itself, even without instrumental accompaniment.
The "ABBA Empire"
In the course of the - also financially - very successful years, the four Swedes and their manager Stig Anderson built up a hardly manageable conglomerate with different companies, company participations and other capital investments, which was also often called the "ABBA Empire". Among them was, for example, the company "Sannes Trading", which Stig Anderson had founded together with the Swedish businessman Anders Wall after the group's success in Eastern Europe, with the purpose of making compensation deals with the countries of the Eastern Bloc. However, the company was not successful because the products offered by the Eastern Bloc countries could not be sold in Sweden. At the end of the 1970s, Sannes Trading was renamed "Pol Oil" and from then on concentrated on the oil business. The purchase of 55,000 tons of crude oil at the beginning of 1980 brought the company a loss of 30 million kronor, after which it had to close down.
Shortly after the breakup of the band, a massive crisis followed due to superficial and partly uncontrolled management as well as dubious financial management (including back taxes, speculative borrowing, dubious stock market speculations) with high financial losses also for Fältskog, Andersson, Ulvaeus and their manager Anderson. Only Lyngstad remained largely unscathed, as she had already sold her capital shares in the course of the separation from ABBA. In January 1990, Stig Anderson finally sold Polar Music, including almost all exploitation and licensing rights to the registered ABBA trademark, to the media conglomerate Polygram for 300 million kroner. The sale was overshadowed by a lawsuit filed by the former ABBA members against their ex-manager, when in the course of it it became known that the label had paid out only 3 percent instead of the agreed 9 percent royalties for years under his management. The conflict was settled out of court in July 1991, but led to a rift between Stig Anderson on the one hand and Fältskog, Ulvaeus and Andersson on the other.
Sales figures
There are no consistent figures on the number of ABBA records sold: Estimates range from about 140 million to over 500 million. At the beginning of 1977, the sales figures were given in a television report with 44 million (14 million albums, 30 million singles). In the spring of 1978, calculations by Polar Music gave a total of 53 million units, while the US label Atlantic Records gave record sales as 120 million as part of the band's promotional tour. This figure was also adopted in the TV special ABBA in Japan, but is questionable, not least because of the publicity fraud common in the US at the time and the label's method of calculation. In 1983, according to an estimate by the Guinness Book of Records, ABBA had already sold 125 million records. As of May 1985, their record sales were estimated by the same with 215 million units.
In 1992 it is said to have been already 250 million, as it is mentioned among others in the documentary Thank You ABBA from 1993. Through the ABBA revival, sales allegedly rose again to 350 million, which is also considered questionable. Since the official sales figures for ABBA Gold, which was instrumental in the success of the ABBA revival, are 15 million copies by 1999, 85 million other ABBA albums and singles would therefore have had to be sold to equal this figure. Based on this calculation, ABBA received a symbolic award in 2004 for 360 million records sold, and in 2010 the group was presented with another for 375 million records. In 2013, Björn Ulvaeus gave the sales figures as 380 million records, referring to Universal Music. Annually, it is estimated that over three million ABBA records are still sold. In 2019, the number of records sold was put at around 385 million.
International success
The worldwide popularity of ABBA from 1975 onwards was, apart from the commercial aspect, also remarkable in that until the 1970s there had been no other band from Sweden or Scandinavia that had achieved comparable success. The success of Swedish music artists since the 1950s had mostly been limited to their home country, with sales of 50,000 copies of an album already considered a major success. Their second album Waterloo had already set a sales record in Sweden with 250,000 copies in 1974, and their fourth album Arrival sold as many as 750,000 copies two years later. By 1979, the group had sold 2.9 million records in Sweden.
The intention to succeed on the international and especially the English-speaking music market had ABBA manager Stig Anderson as well as Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus already at an early stage. As a result, it quickly became a goal for the musicians to compete in the Eurovision Song Contest in order to at least gain recognition among a large international audience. With this in mind, many of the group's hits were produced in the early years of their career, while Anderson, as manager, used his worldwide contacts to release the songs as singles in all markets. After first successes outside their home country in 1973, especially in Scandinavia and the Benelux countries, ABBA's success after the 1974 Eurovision Song Contest was enormous, especially in Germany, Sweden, Norway, the Netherlands, Great Britain and Australia. But also in smaller to medium-sized music markets such as Austria, Switzerland, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Ireland and New Zealand, the band was able to record partly great chart and sales successes.
In 1976, the most successful year of ABBA's career, the group had three number one hits in the UK, Ireland, Belgium and the Netherlands, four number one hits in Germany and New Zealand and five number one hits in Australia. In addition, at least one of the group's singles topped the charts in Norway, Sweden, Austria, France and Switzerland in 1976.
In Germany, the group had regular promotional appearances in various popular music shows on television. In addition to occasional guest appearances on shows such as Am laufenden Band with Rudi Carrell or Aktuelle Schaubude, it was mainly appearances on music shows such as ZDF's Disco with Ilja Richter, Radio Bremen's Musikladen or Starparade presented by Rainer Holbe. In Great Britain all singles from 1974 to 1981 placed at least in the top ten of the charts, eight of them reached the top position. With a total of 11.3 million copies, ABBA today rank third among the bands with the best-selling singles in the UK. Dancing Queen is the most successful single, selling over a million copies. Until 1982 eight albums in a row reached the top position. To date, a total of 17 million ABBA albums have been sold in the UK. The release of their recordings in Great Britain was always accompanied by appearances and interviews on television as well as a total of 15 concerts in 1977 and 1979.
In contrast, the band never achieved a similarly big breakthrough in the USA. Already in 1972 the US label Playboy Records released the first records of the group, but all of them never reached the charts. In 1974, Stig Anderson signed a three-year contract with Atlantic Records, which distributed all of the band's records in the USA until their breakup. Although ABBA made promotional trips there in 1974, 1975, 1976 and 1978, none of their albums made it beyond the Top 20. The success of their singles was also limited, with one number one hit and three top ten hits; six others reached the top 20. Benny Andersson stated in a 1976 interview that the US music market was generally more difficult for bands from Europe to reach than, say, Europe or Australia. Not only music videos and TV appearances are important here, but above all the live presence of a group. However, the demand for ABBA records did not increase much after their US tour in 1979. In Japan, their success was mainly due to their promotional tour in the fall of 1978, whose television appearances and specials were released on DVD in 2009 under the title ABBA in Japan. Their concerts were completely sold out in 1980. In addition, numerous licensed LPs of ABBA were released in Japan, some of which are difficult to obtain today and therefore represent collector's items.
Criticism
In 1970s Sweden, music was strongly influenced by the progressive "Music Movement", or "Progg" for short, which included music publishers, record labels, newspapers and radio stations. Characteristic of this style of music was above all its left-wing character, which was reflected in political lyrics and was by no means geared towards commercial success. This was in contrast to ABBA, who were reproached countless times by the prog movement. The youth editor-in-chief of the Swedish Broadcasting Corporation said: "Their [ABBA's] music doesn't express any feelings, and the idea of commerce constantly shines through. Thus the music becomes a passionless, cold product [...]" (Palm, 2006). The 1975 Eurovision Song Contest, which was held in Sweden, led to the organization of the Alternative Festival as a counter-event and to Sweden not participating in the Song Contest the following year.
Especially after ABBA's victory in the Song Contest and in the following years, the group and their manager were criticized for their appearance. The music was described as "gifted crap" that "lacks a personal expression" (Halling, 2014). The group was called "the result of hardened cynicism," accused that their music "aims primarily to fill the creators' bank accounts without giving anything in return to the listeners" (Halling, 2014). In 1975, the article in a Swedish newspaper said, "I love you sing ABBA while pointing to the audience. But this is mendacious. ABBA don't love us, only the 20 kronor they take out of our pockets [...]" (Palm, 2006). The progg movement went so far that musicians like Janne Schaffer, Mike Watson or Ulf Andersson who collaborated with ABBA were ostracized. Schaffer, for example, was forbidden to play in halls that were under the influence of the movement. Through ABBA, a "two-class society" of music was created in Sweden at the time, in which a distinction was made between "commercial" and "non-commercial" artists.
Unlike Sweden, ABBA was largely well received in the US soon after their Song Contest victory. By this time, many critics complained that rock music had become an "often pretentious and pompous art form." ABBA thus represented an innovative new departure; for example, Ken Barnes wrote in Rolling Stone, "With their concise and fast-paced pop numbers, ABBA are much closer to actual rock 'n' roll than many of those overblown guitar cannons or those soulful groupings that seek to bring cosmo-dynamic enlightenment to the bewildered masses" (Palm, 2006). Other critics also wrote that Waterloo "stands out clearly from that whole morass of soul ballads and trivial country music [...]" (Palm, 2006). Similarly, later albums such as Arrival and ABBA - The Album received good reviews, including in Billboard magazine, which called Arrival "an album that showed signs of artistic development." The songs on The Album were praised for "the catchy, thoughtful lyrics never getting lost under the powerful backing of keyboard/synthesizer with strings, guitar and bass in the background."
In the UK, rock music critics in particular were surprised that ABBA had great success in the British market. A pop group that "just wanted to entertain" disappointed the expectation of a continuation of the lineage in rock music. ABBA was accused of not being rooted in the traditions of blues and soul music (Palm, 2006). On their concert tour through Great Britain in 1977, critics wrote that the group would "manipulate cleverly and ruthlessly", releasing "single after single with the precision of a robot"; they attested a "lack of warmth, an almost icy atmosphere in the technically perfect live shows" (Palm, 2006).
Awards and honors
ABBA received a Bravo Otto in the category "Band" from the youth magazine Bravo for nine consecutive years (1974-1982), but never reached first place ("Golden Otto") in the Bravo readers' poll.
- "Silver Otto" (2nd place): 1974, 1978, 1979, 1980 and 1982.
- "Bronze Otto" (3rd place): 1975, 1976, 1977 and 1981.
On April 18, 1977, ABBA attended a gala spring festival for the Expressen newspaper and was presented with a "Golden Wasp" for the 1976 television documentary ABBA-DABBA-Doo! which had been voted the best programme of the year by the public.
In 1983 a stamp block Musik i Sverige was issued in Sweden, which also included a stamp with a motif of ABBA showing the band on a stage in front of a cheering audience. The motif is based on a photograph taken by Anders Hanser on 18 September 1979 at a concert in Portland (Oregon) (USA). Another stamp with a motif of ABBA was issued in Sweden in March 2000. The theme of this stamp is the musical development - especially in the Eurovision Song Contest (at that time Grand Prix Eurovision de la Chanson). On the stamp ABBA in the costumes of 1974 is juxtaposed with a young artist in a "New Wave/Techno outfit".
In 2002, ABBA was inducted into the Vocal Group Hall of Fame in Sharon, Pennsylvania, USA, which honors the world's best vocal groups.
On 23 January 2009, Fältskog and Lyngstad jointly accepted the Rockbjörnen ("Rock Bear") award in Stockholm, which was presented to the pop group for their life's work by the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet.
In 2010, ABBA was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
In September 2012, four wax figures of ABBA were made by Madame Tussauds. The figures wear the outfits with which the group had performed in 1975 as part of the promotional tour for their third album ABBA. They had been on display in London since October 2012. In January 2013, the figures moved on to Vienna, where they remained until mid-March. From 20 April 2013, the figures were on display in Berlin for two months. At the end of April 2015, the figures moved again to Vienna for three months, where they were on display as part of a special Song Contest exhibition.
