The London gateway

The London Gateway
The business dimension of internationalization in Nordic popular music

by Fabian Holt

last night I interviewed a London-based music professional who manages Nordic artists with global careers. We talked about his twenty-five years of experience in bringing Nordic artists into markets outside the Nordic region. The interview backed up some of my ideas about the music industry and other cultural industries as a dimension of globalization in popular culture. People that write about the internationalization of music scenes tend to write about it from the perspective of experience and media culture. But music industry professionals and their organization of markets have important functions in shaping music cultures in the global era. Also, it was interesting to hear his description of how Scandinavian music scenes have become much more international in less than fifteen years. (Although none of this is controversial, I am not revealing the person's name, primarily to focus on the general perspective rather than this individual situation)

I then started to write this fieldnote about London as a gateway for Nordic music. The city is the most important gateway in Nordic music export. It's the place where many artists from the Nordic countries go when they want to reach audiences outside of their immediate home territories, including neighboring countries. However, London also has other functions. It provides a key to understanding how the Nordic music scene is becoming part of the global village.

A key point is that the London-based professionals specializing in the Nordic market have developed relationships with and influenced the mindsets of Nordic artists. These London professionals are not simply taking Nordic talent out of the region and into British and North American markets. They are not simply curators and gatekeepers. They have gone to shows, talked to musicians, and contributed to the development of new business networks in the Nordic countries. In the words of my interviewee, the current networks are relatively new:

One of the problems with Scandinavia twenty-some years ago was that there was no business infrastructure. There were few managers and a lot of them were bookers who pretended to be a manager who had never done anything outside of Scandinavia. Not for any other reason than they were worried because they had never been beyond that. Even though there had been Abba, arguably one of the biggest acts in the world ever, there was very little experience of international acts.

Sweden and later Iceland developed music scenes with aspirations for international careers before other Nordic countries, but they foster different cultural environments. Whereas the several of the Swedish stars from Abba to Roxette and First Aid Kit play American- and British-style music that blend in with artists coming from the United Kingdom and the United States, the Iceland scene and later the Faroese and Norwegian scenes, but to some extent also the Danish scene have fostered environments in which it is valued to have a slightly more distinct Nordic identity. While Sígur Ros might be perceived as a form of world music, it is generally not marketed as world music, and Teitur's music has subtle elements of American roots aesthetics, but it is not really American-style music like First Aid Kit. Efterklang from Denmark similarly identifies with local natural envirnoments in their videos, but is also neither world music nor American-style music.

De-emphasizing place identity is to some extent a form of de-essentialization that creates new freedoms for Nordic artists not to necessarily be cast in the Orientalist gaze of world music.  Interestingly, international brokers of Nordic music say that they know when to break an artist as national (Danish or Norwegian, for instance), regional (Nordic or Scandinavian) or not to bring up place at all. The Nordic label is increasingly associated with 'quality music', but it is not used in all situations. Place identification in media culture might always have been a little superficial and flexible, but it is clear that the Nordic label is not a dominant one. It is possible for Nordic artists to reach audiences in other parts of the world without a strong element of exoticism (if you are interested, Philip Bohlman is writing a chapter on the concept of Borealism as a form of Orientalist gaze on the Nordic region within the history of the European empire).

Watch this video of a Danish and Icelandic artist that met each other when they were touring in Canada as support acts for the Faroese artist Teitur. A London manager helped organize this tour. The couple is now married, by the way. The video can be watched in HD.