Hit Makers: Why Things Become Popular

by Derek Thompson

If pop music were a global technology, Sweden would be its Silicon Valley. Sweden and Swedish expats are the world’s inexhaustible fount of catchy melodies. Led by Max Martin, the legendary superproducer responsible for dozens of number one singles by the Backstreet Boys, Katy Perry, and Taylor Swift, the small Scandinavian country has been exporting contagious music to the world since ABBA debuted in the 1970s. Why Sweden? The answer involves a mix of policy, history, and the magnetizing effect of talent. First, the Swedish government actively promotes public music education at a time when many countries have no such policy (“I have public music education to thank for everything,” Martin said in 2001). Second, Sweden has a musical culture that promotes major-chord melodies over lyrics, which makes their songs highly exportable to audiences who don’t speak Swedish. Third, since ABBA’s heyday in the 1970s, Sweden has built a national industry dedicated to writing, producing, and selling pop music, which attracts some of the best pop talent in the world—like a gifted Indian American teenager from Austin, Texas. Economists sometimes call this magnetizing effect “agglomeration,” and it’s why similar companies have a tendency to congregate in the same cities.10 When geographers at Uppsala University studied Sweden’s music industry, they said that it followed a model that economist Michael Porter calls “industrial clustering.” The same way that talented entrepreneurs go to San F...