Per Sundin on ABBA, buying Avicii's rights – and why he thinks the smartest music execs will soon be working on catalogs

<p>If you watch the new Netflix dramatization of the Spotify story – &apos;The Playlist&apos; – you&apos;ll come across an entire episode told from the perspective of Per Sundin.<br/><br/>That&apos;s because Sundin was the CEO of Universal Music Sweden at the time of Spotify&apos;s EU launch (2008), and one of the early believers that Daniel Ek&apos;s streaming platform could one day rule the global music industry.<br/><br/>Yet arguably what Sundin&apos;s up to today is even more worthy of some TV drama treatment. As he explains on this MBW Podcast, Sundin has since 2019 been CEO of Pophouse Entertainment – the Stockholm-based company behind a number of successful ventures with ABBA.<br/><br/>The most radical of those ventures is ABBA Voyage, the technologically stunning &apos;virtual concert residency&apos; from the legendary Swedish band that has been playing to hundreds of thousands of wowed ticketholders in London since May this year. <br/><br/>Portraying the group as they appeared in 1977, the show has been created by ABBA in conjunction with Pophouse and Industrial Light &amp; Magic, the Disney-owned visual effects company most famous for working on Star Wars properties through the decades. (Founding ABBA member Björn Ulvaeus is a shareholder in, and board member of, Pophouse.)<br/><br/>PopHouse recently got even more interesting from a music business perspective, <a href='https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/pophouse-entertainment-buys-75-of-avicii-master-recordings-and-publishing/'>buying a majority stake </a>in the rights of catalogs created by names such as Swedish House Mafia and Avicii. <br/><br/>On this podcast, Sundin tells us how Pophouse plans to &quot;amplify&quot; the artist brands behind this catalog music using lessons learnt from working with ABBA. <br/><br/>He also discusses why he&apos;s confident, after a major financial investment, that the ABBA Voyage show will soon become profitable, go global – and change the face of &apos;virtual&apos; artist performances forever more. <br/><br/>And