Dancing screens: how Abba struck gold with the digital generation
My, my! Almost 40 years after Abba’s most recent studio album – 1981’s The Visitors, after which they quietly split – Benny Andersson, Anni-Frid (Frida) Lyngstad, Agnetha F?ltskog and Bj?rn Ulvaeus have this week reunited in spectacular style. But, despite the instant familiarity of the two new tracks already released to the public, this has been anything but a straightforward comeback.
The quartet were persuaded to regroup by Spice Girls manager Simon Fuller, who approached the band members in 2016 and planted the idea that they go on tour as holograms. Long story short, they agreed and, five whole years later after a few false starts, they have this week announced a new 10-track album; two new singles, the Frida-led ballad I Still Have Faith In You and the shimmying Agnetha-driven stomper Don’t Shut Me Down.
And they will indeed go on tour, as state-of-the-art 'Abbatars'.
But just as the band’s precision-engineered pop seems deceptively simple, much has gone on beneath the bonnet to get this juggernaut back on the road. Creating the “heyday Abba” holograms that will be appearing on stage, in place of the live septuagenarians, involved motion-capture tech from George Lucas’s Industrial Light and Magic, a team of 850 people – all sworn to secrecry – and a new motion capture system called Flux.
Wait, what? If this doesn’t sound like the ABBA you know and love – and more like a gigantic science experiment – in a way, it is.
If you stop thinking about Abba as four loveable Eurovision-winning Swedes bopping about in daffy jumpsuits and start thinking about them as a cannily managed factory creating leading-edge entertainment products at a crucial stage in a cultural industrial revolution, then Voyage – as the comeback album and tour have been branded – starts to feel an even more significant moment in the history of music.
“ABBA has always been a brand,” explains Professor Nigel Nicholson, evolutionary psychologist at the London Business School. “All successful bands intersect with the culture using sound, appearance and an ethos that people can instantly relate to.”
And the songwriting partnership of Andersson/Ulvaeus knew how to write a hook that could get the foot tapping and a lyric that could pluck a heartstring – and then get hardwired into a collective consciousness. In the space of just six years, the band scored nine number ones in the UK alone, making so much money that, by 1978, they were Sweden’s most successful export, outselling Volvo and Ikea.
Abba was always a business at heart. One story goes that, when they went on tour, they had elaborate costumes made not only for stage impact but to maximise tax efficiency: they could claim back the cost of the outfits if they weren’t street-wearable.
But why, so late in the day (Andersson told a press conference on Thursday they wanted to reunite “before we were dead”), go to the trouble of pioneering next-generation music technology and building your own stadium for a comeback project? Why not just release a ninth studio album and watch the money, money, money pour in?
Because, in the years since ABBA last sang together, the music industry has been blown to pieces. As a money-making machine, back catalogues – even ABBA’s – are next to worthless in the digital-download age.
Crispin Hunt – who achieved a level of fame in the 1990s as the singer of Britpop band Longpigs – is a multi-platinum selling songwriter, having penned hits for the likes of Lana Del Rey, Ellie Goulding, Florence and the Machine, Jake Bugg and Rod Stewart, among others. It’s a living, he explains – but the world of streaming services and online video hasn’t rewarded the songwriter.
“If I’d written songs that reached the same chart position in the 1980s or 1990s, I wouldn’t be talking to you now,” he says wryly. “I’d be by the pool in LA. But as long as Spotify pays, on average, between $0.006 and $0.0084 per stream, and while YouTube’s royalties are cloaked in secrecy, that’s impossible to imagine. A song on the BBC Radio 1 C list – that’s six plays in a week – earns the artist around ￡75, while over 10 million plays on YouTube earns around ￡65.
"The only way to make money as a musician these days is to be able to sell out 2,000-seat venues or larger. Unless you sell more than 2,000 tickets, you’re losing money.” The ABBA Arena being built in Pudding Mill Lane, east London, has capacity for 3,000 people.
Traditionally, as Ulvaeus explained in a 2020 TED talk, ABBA would lose money by heading out on the road. Ulvaeus and Andersson may have directly spawned Sweden’s vast pop music song factory – paving the way for the likes of Max Martin penning Britney Spears' Hit Me Baby One More Time, Taylor Swift’s Shake It Off and the Weeknd’s Blinding Lights, and helped make Sweden the world’s largest exporter of pop hits by population size – but they’ll be making more from investments in apps and concert technology than from Spotify streams.
There’s another vital reason why the hologram tour is at the heart of the ABBA comeback – and it’s that it appeals to the youngest demographic.
With their radio-friendly harmonies and bittersweet lyrics,the band have always had multi-generational appeal. For those not alive when Dancing Queen first compelled Baby Boomers to take to the dancefloor, there was the band’s 1990s revival, prompted by Erasure’s number one Abba-esque EP, tribute band Bjorn Again on the festival circuit and the hit film, Muriel’s Wedding. The Mamma Mia stage musical sparked another nostalgic wave, before millennials and Gen Z-ers were swept up by the two Mamma Mia films.
Streaming services have has made the band’s back catalogue instantly available to anyone who cares to listen – and, according to Spotify, the age group that plays ABBA the most are 18-to-24-year-old; and they’ve been streaming hits such as Super Trouper and Name of the Game more with every passing year, their ABBA listening time up by more than 50 per cent since 2014.
And, as of a few days ago, ABBA is a TikTok sensation. Within 24 hours of their verified account appearing at the end of last month, the page had racked up millions of streams. Hundreds of young users have posted clips of themselves singing along to the hits that have provided their parents – and grandparents – with the soundtrack to their lives.
When my 17-year-old daughter learned of the Voyage hologram tour, she surprised me by saying: “I might go. They’ve turned up on TikTok and got so many likes, and if you put ABBA on at any party, everyone gets gassed. I wouldn’t pay to see any other acts – the Beatles would be so slow and depressing. But seeing ABBA do Mamma Mia would be unhinged. Provided it wasn’t too expensive.”
So that’s the equation – they might pull it off if they get the price right. Which, let’s be honest, ABBA ought to be good at. After all, they’ve always been aware that it’s always sunny in a rich man’s world, but most people have to work all night and work all day to pay the bills they have to pay.
Ain’t it sad?
‘TikTok is making the band accessible to a new generation’
By Gemma Ballam, 18, Moray, Scotland
It’s genius that ABBA have decided to join the video-sharing app TikTok, where their music has exploded in popularity. I regularly use TikTok to share videos of me singing covers of popular songs. When I saw that ABBA was trending on the app last month, I decided to record a video of me singing Honey, Honey while playing the piano. My account's engagement went through the roof and the clip received over 130k likes. Since then, I've recorded two more covers of Slipping Through My Fingers and The Winner Takes It All – which have both been popular.
Like many of my peers, my first memory of ABBA music was hearing it in the film Mamma Mia!. But recently, the music has developed a cult following on TikTok. At one point, I was seeing two or three ABBA-themed videos crop up on my homepage every day.
I think ABBA is popular among young people because of the music; it’s upbeat and catchy, making it the perfect backdrop for recording synchronised dances. There's a lot of competition for likes on TikTok, and usually the videos that do well are ones that inspire some kind of emotion.
With ABBA, there’s a song for every mood; Slipping Through My Fingers became my year group’s anthem when we left school this year, and many of my friends have taken part in TikTok challenges to catchy songs like Dancing Queen and Chiquitita. One viral challenge, which has 171.1m views on the app, asks users to recite the chorus to Dancing Queen in one breath. Others challenge you to “guess the ABBA song in one second” and some TikTok DJs have even created techno mixes of ABBA’s top hits.
Some older fans might be sceptical about turning these classic songs into 30-second clips and remixes, but I think it’s all part of making the band accessible to a new generation. ABBA's memorable lyrics are a welcome change to the electronic hits that top the charts now, and their presence on TikTok may even lead to a new fan base. With cancelled exams and school closures, my generation has had a tough few months – and perhaps a Seventies music revival is exactly what the doctor ordered.
As told to Alice Hall
Tickets for Abba's London tour go on sale on Tuesday (abbavoyage.com). The album, Voyage, is released on November 5
