Do Scandinavians make more music than other people? If so, why?

Factual Questions
1

A recent thread on the MusicBrainz forums noted that Sweden and Finland are the #8 and #12 countries in number of releases in the database, and Swedish and Finnish are the #9 and #8 languages in the database, which is surprising considering how small they are (#88 and #112 by population, and the languages are probably about as far down).

It’s always seemed to me that northern Europeans produce more recorded music than other people, Scandinavians more than other northern Europeans, and Swedes and Finns more than other Scandinavians. (The Dutch also seem to be overrepresented, but not to the same degree.)

I’ve asked many Scandinavians (mostly Swedes) about this over the past 20 or so years, and most of them agree.

Unfortunately, I have no idea how to get the facts to test this out. I have the numbers from MusicBrainz (see below), and I think I could get similar numbers from Discogs, but any such database is going to be a vanishingly-small fraction of actual releases, and full of selection artifacts.* But I don’t know of any better databases. (Also, it would be interesting to know if Finnish labels are putting out more Finnish releases of foreign albums, more original albums, or both, and I can’t get that easily from either database.)

So, how would I find out whether I’m right?

And my second question is, if I’m right, why is this true?

In case you want the MusicBrainz numbers, they’re at http://pastebin.ca/1968601. Adding in the populations from List of countries and dependencies by population - Wikipedia, there are only 13 countries with more than 500 releases per million citizens, and the list seems to bear out my suspicions:**

Finland: 2126.83
United Kingdom: 2108.95
Sweden: 1486.96
Iceland: 1112.51
Netherlands: 1028.98
Germany: 1028.98
Norway: 837.40
Denmark: 709.98
United States: 706.36
Belgium: 662.85
Australia: 633.63
New Zealand: 538.80
France: 528.52

  • Finns are probably more computer-literate than Khazakhs, and more likely to speak enough English to get started on the site. Obsessive music fans could easily be overrepresented in Finland even if musicians aren’t. Finnish labels probably put out fewer pan-Europe releases (which would get listed as Europe instead of Finland at MB) than German labels. The MB website and tagger work better in Latin-script languages than in, say, Chinese. MB is small enough that one heavily active editor could skew the entire database. And so on.

** The major English-speaking countries also do well, but this has an obvious explanation: they produce music for most of the world.

2

One part of the equation would be that we have the time and money to spare.

3

For the “why” question, here are some theories that I’ve heard (mostly from Swedes, and most of them band members), roughly in order of how often I’ve heard them:

  1. Scandinavia was mostly ignored by the record labels until the late 70s, so a strong indie label scene arose by necessity. And, even today, it’s easier to create an indie label targeting 8 million people in a small area than 100 million people over a much wider area–and, once you’re up and running, it’s easier to compete with WEA Scandinavia than WEA France.

  2. Effective social democracy means it’s much easier to be a starving young musician without actually starving. (This one comes from a right-wing politician and former pop star who calls it the only positive benefit of the welfare state.) Plus, decades of general prosperity and stability means more free time for everything.

  3. Scandinavia for some reason both breeds and preserves genres that are considered minor niches world-wide (Norway and black metal, Sweden and modern synthpop, Iceland and quirky gothy post-punk), which means their DIY bands don’t have to compete with UK/US manufactured pop bands.

  4. It’s cold as hell, so all there is to do is sit around indoors and listen to music, and eventually that gets boring so you start making your own music.

  5. Scandinavian culture was based on sagas much more recently than mainland culture was based on minstrels. Plus, sagas are more down-to-earth than their mainland counterparts, so the traditions translate better to popular music.

  6. Something to do with homogenous societies. Or something to do with heterogeneous border areas in otherwise-homogenous countries (places like Malmö and Vehkalahti seem to be overrepresented within Scandinavia, just like Hamburg is overrepresented within Germany or Brugge in Belgium, but the contrast between Malmö and Stockholm is much greater than between Hamburg and Frankfurt, so Malmö produces so ridiculously much music that it drags the whole country up).

On clicking “Preview” I see that naita has already given the second half of #2.

4

You don’t need any complicated explanation for this. Look up a list of countries by highest annual GNP or highest income equality. The list will be fairly close to this one. In a country that’s poor overall or where most of the citizens are poor, most of the citizens will be too worried about not starving to have time to be able to engage in any artistic venture.

5

Income equality isn’t a good match. Although it does place the Scandinavian countries near the top, it doesn’t fit anything else. By Gini index, out of 128 rated countries, the US is way down at #78, and the UK at #51, and the mainland European countries show up in almost the exact opposite order you’d expect. Essentially the same is true for any other measure of economic equality.

But your GNP idea bears out amazingly well. All of the countries on the list that have a reported 2009 GNI (New Zealand doesn’t have one) are in the top 16 worldwide. The 4 extra countries in the top 16 are Singapore and Luxembourg (both of which are small, and mostly get their music from Hong Kong/Taiwan and Belgium/Netherlands), and Austria and Canada (which are #16 and #18 on the list of releases, despite getting a good chunk of their music from Germany and the US). Even the order of those 12 isn’t too far off.

Plus, it agrees with naita, and with the second most common answer I’ve heard in asking Swedish musicians.

So, maybe the why question is that simple.

This still leaves to question of whether there’s an actual phenomenon here (and how I’d go about finding that out).

6

I have the impression (sorry for not having statistics to back this up) that northern Europeans have a very high rate of cultural participation and cultural output in general, and that recorded music is only one aspect of this wider phenomenon.

7

Does releasing the same thing under different languages count? If so that might account for it, as well as the Netherlands too.

I found that Dutch, Swedes, Danes and Norwegians seem to have the best handle on speaking English and other languages. Every person I’ve ever known from those countries speaks at least three langugages, (home language + English + another)

And they speak them WELL too.

8

How do they stack up in per capita purchases of songs? It could be that they just prefer variety. I.e., they don’t all go out and buy the latest Lada Gaga album by the millions. Perhaps they buy a spread of not-so-popular albums. It’s the “long end of the tail” without such a big peak.

In the US, a few record companies control the market and their preference is to focus on selling a huge number of records from a tiny number of artists. This is not so much the case in the UK, for example, resulting a some notable differences between what goes over well in each country. And the result in the UK is more variety is heard.

9

There might be something to that–but that seems like it would be even harder to measure…

Yes; for example, Kraftwerk’s Man-Machine and Mensch-Maschine are separate albums in the MusicBrainz database.

But, even if I could pull that info out of the database, I think the sample size would be too small to help.

Anyway, my impression is that this kind of thing is much more common in Germany than anywhere else, with France, Russia, and Spain/Latin America coming in behind. I agree that Scandinavians and Beneluxers seem to be more likely to be good polylinguists, but I don’t think they often release the same single or album in two languages.

I think the issue here is the labels. When Warner puts out a worldwide album in English by Kraftwerk or Blümchen, putting out a German version of the album can increase sales in a market of 80 million; doing the same thing for Abba or Alphaville* would only increase sales in a market of 1/10th the size. So, it only happens when the band really wants it to (as with Sugarcubes’ first album, the only Scandinavian example I can think of).

Well, the data I’m trying to explain is the number of different releases, not the total sales, so that could fit what you’re saying. The question is, does Sweden buy more Lady Gaga albums than France per capita, as well as buying more different separate releases, or fewer? If it’s more, then “good economy” may be the whole story; if it’s fewer, there’s more going on (although it could still just be “more local music, which is in turn because of the good economy”).

I have even less data here, but this is something that should be researchable, at least.

Actually, I think the UK-vs.-US thing may have different explanations. The UK is as major-label-dominated as the US, but they don’t have the music press under their thumb the way the US industry has since the late 60s. Today’s hot new band can have their career killed 6 months later by the infamous NME backlash. This means they have to spend fewer resources on each band, keep the single alive as a viable format, and constantly keep looking for new bands. (Compare and contrast the careers of, say, Stone Temple Pilots and Republica…)

  • I’m not even going to bring up the question of why so many Scandinavian bands that become internationally popular start with A (Abba, Alphaville, A-Ha, Aqua, Apoptygma Berzerk, …).
10

tiny nitpick: Alphaville is (was?) a German band.

11

One of the explanations that’s been pitched in Scandinavia is that there are good, public music schools that doesn’t cost an arm and a leg in tuition fees, where students can borrow instruments and learn music and music theory up to conservatory proficiency. The chief competing theory is the network of municipal leisure centres for young people that provide places for bands to practice and venues for gigs.

Country size matters as well, as the distances are small culturally as well as geographically. The Swedish popular music scene in the fifties, sixties and seventies was small enough that one man (when the man was Stikkan Andersson) could make a huge impact. Stockholm, the large rock festivals and the aforementioned youth leisure centres are close enough that new bands can tour the country fairly cheaply and record albums. Compare this to the costs of touring the US. The close degree of international cooperation between the Nordic countries (Nordic citizens have been allowed to travel without passports in the other Nordic countries since the fifties) made touring abroad easy, and Swedish, Danish and Norwegian are close enough that you get by without learning another language. (Finnish is another matter, but most of the time, Finnish entertainment business has been bilingual.) Lastly, I think the antagonism between commercial pop and rock on the one hand and the progg movement on the other revitalised rather than harmed the music scene. The progg movement made it OK to write lyrics in other languages than English, if you didn’t fit into one camp you probably fit into the other, and it’s never yet hurt a music genre to be portrayed as the great Enemy and devourer of souls.

12

vifslan, you bring up a lot of good explanations–some of which I’ve heard before, some of which I haven’t. Also, it sounds like this is taken pretty seriously as a real phenomenon to be explained, so there’s probably much better data out there than I’ve been able to dig up using MusicBrainz. Any pointers to where I can read more?

Also, do you think the progg movement (and the related growth of small indie labels 15 years before the rest of the world) helps explain why Scandinavia spawns and preserves a wide variety of niche genres, or it more a matter of more people from every walk of life making music means more kinds of music?

Except for Christian rock. :slight_smile:

Oops. I knew that. And it’s not that tiny; they sing about Germany often enough that only an idiot or someone suffering sleep deprivation could have made that mistake… (PS, it’s “is”; they’re still around, and still German, although I heard that after all those years of being the only famous thing to come out of Münster other than cheese, they moved to Berlin.)

Anyway, it’s not a serious theory, which is why I relegated it to a footnote. One day, I was drinking with Robert Enforsen of Elegant Machinery, and somehow the idea came up, so we made a list of “Scandinavian bands that are more popular outside of Scandinavia than Elegant Machinery,” and almost half of them started with A. The rest of his band wasn’t convinced. Richard insisted that we were deliberately thinking up A names, and probably going through the A section of my record collection, but then he hadn’t drank enough vodka to be taken seriously.

13

When it’s that dark and cold outside, what else is there to do but sit inside and practice an instrument?

14

You beat me to it. I’d say that is one major reason. Unfortunately the present Swedish government, or rather local councils with the same political leaning, is cutting down on it

That is quite true as well. Put the two explanations together and I think that will cover a lot.

15

I don’t know anything about this really, but it strikes me that Scandanavians may also be overrepresented in the on-line and computer worlds, so they’re going to show up more in on-line music data. Which partially goes back to ‘middle-class and above, educated’ societies, of course, but may also be partly random culture.

16

I think Quercus might be on to something. Most youth (who in turn produce most of the music, at least in terms of volume) in Scandinavia spend a lot of time online. It’s entirely natural for those people to debùt or share their music online. And there’s a huge multi-project culture for “serious” musicians, at least in Norway. If you deconstructed a band like, say, Dimmu Borgir or Kent you’d find that most of the musicians are also doing two or three other projects on the side, at the very least.