Fact #69889
When:
Short story:
Stig Anderson, manager of Abba and writer of over 3,000 song lyrics, dies of a heart attack in Stockholm, Sweden, Europe, aged 66.
Full article:
Thomas Johansson (promoter) : I worked with Abba throughout their career and I learned a lot of things from Stig Anderson. He was originally one of the biggest music publishers in Scandinavia, he wrote a lot of lyrics, he translated them from foreign languages into Swedish, because he was really a music man. It was from Stig that I learned the vital importance of the voice and the song in popular music, and if you add on to that image or attitude, or whatever you want to call it, then you’re really getting there.
Stig also taught me that when you’re making a deal, both parties should be happy with that deal when they leave the table. Because then both parties will do a much better job on that deal. That’s absolutely important to remember and I’ve been lucky enough to have worked with a lot of artists, and I mean really big acts, where even if the negotiations have been tough or hard, but they’ve never been harsh or bad. We’ve always walked away from the table with both parties happy. That’s super-important.
I learned a lot about music publishers at that time because Stig was a publisher, so if we went to Australia or America or Germany, the publisher was always one of the people I was talking to. I had the promoter, of course, and the record company, but I also had the publisher to speak with in each market. Abba were with Sony in the UK, Atlantic in America, EMI in some other territories.
I think it was a clever strategy but I also think it came about because Stig had done so many things over the years and had developed relationships and friends in lots of different companies. I think that’s really how it came about.
I used a lot of things I had learned from Stig when I went on to work with Roxette. I was managing Roxette from 1989 until I sold the company in 1999, which was the ten years they had in which they sold over 100m records. I did all of the Roxette tours across the world. They were different to Abba in that they toured all the time, they toured everywhere, we must have played over 40 countries.
(Source : interview with Johnny Black for Audience magazine, March 2019)
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Stig also taught me that when you’re making a deal, both parties should be happy with that deal when they leave the table. Because then both parties will do a much better job on that deal. That’s absolutely important to remember and I’ve been lucky enough to have worked with a lot of artists, and I mean really big acts, where even if the negotiations have been tough or hard, but they’ve never been harsh or bad. We’ve always walked away from the table with both parties happy. That’s super-important.
I learned a lot about music publishers at that time because Stig was a publisher, so if we went to Australia or America or Germany, the publisher was always one of the people I was talking to. I had the promoter, of course, and the record company, but I also had the publisher to speak with in each market. Abba were with Sony in the UK, Atlantic in America, EMI in some other territories.
I think it was a clever strategy but I also think it came about because Stig had done so many things over the years and had developed relationships and friends in lots of different companies. I think that’s really how it came about.
I used a lot of things I had learned from Stig when I went on to work with Roxette. I was managing Roxette from 1989 until I sold the company in 1999, which was the ten years they had in which they sold over 100m records. I did all of the Roxette tours across the world. They were different to Abba in that they toured all the time, they toured everywhere, we must have played over 40 countries.
(Source : interview with Johnny Black for Audience magazine, March 2019)