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

If you watch the new Netflix dramatization of the Spotify story – 'The Playlist' – you'll come across an entire episode told from the perspective of Per Sundin.That's because Sundin was the CEO of Universal Music Sweden at the time of Spotify's EU launch (2008), and one of the early believers that Daniel Ek's streaming platform could one day rule the global music industry.Yet arguably what Sundin'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.The most radical of those ventures is ABBA Voyage, the technologically stunning 'virtual concert residency' from the legendary Swedish band that has been playing to hundreds of thousands of wowed ticketholders in London since May this year. Portraying the group as they appeared in 1977, the show has been created by ABBA in conjunction with Pophouse and Industrial Light & 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.)PopHouse recently got even more interesting from a music business perspective, buying a majority stake in the rights of catalogs created by names such as Swedish House Mafia and Avicii. On this podcast, Sundin tells us how Pophouse plans to "amplify" the artist brands behind this catalog music using lessons learnt from working with ABBA. He also discusses why he's confident, after a major financial investment, that the ABBA Voyage show will soon become profitable, go global – and change the face of 'virtual' artist performances forever more. And he explains why he believes that the major record companies will soon switch their smartest executives (if they haven't already) to focus more on catalog, rather than frontline, music.The MBW Podcast is supported by Voly Music.Music Business Worldwide's Podcasts are supported by Voly Entertainment (previously known as Voly Music).