Sverige

A summary of the media landscape in Sweden.

A summary of the Swedish music industry.

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Filip Hiltmann
Filip Hiltmann
PR & Marketing Manager, Way Out West Festival

Way Out West is often associated with sustainability. Tell us more about it!

Sustainability lies in the core of Way Out West, and through the years the festival has done a bunch of initiatives to lower its climate footprint. The biggest, and most spoken about, was when the festival became fully vegetarian ten years ago. A study made afterwards showed that 15 % of the visitors said that they ate more vegetarian food after attending Way Out West – that’s real change, and proof that festivals can change people’s behavior. With that said, what we do at the site during the festivals three days matters too. Every year we look at our numbers and try to get better in all possible ways. There is just no time to wait when our planet is burning.

Artist and bands from a wide range of genres perform at Way Out West. How is the selection done and how much of the line-up usually consists of international artists?

Way Out West started as a way to create a festival that we didn’t think existed, a festival that we’d like to visit ourselves. A lot has changed through the years, but this mindset remains the same to this day, which obviously also applies to our bookings. The lineup, which has been gender-balanced for several years, consists of acts that we in one way or another think belong on the bill and together create some kind of entity. You have to get a certain feeling when looking at the line-up poster, which is harder to achieve than most people think. The amount of international artists vary for each year, but we do tend to book a lot of them and would book even more if we could find room. Sometimes there’s just too many great acts around!

Way Out West has a new graphic profile every year that runs throughout the project such as communication, posters and festival area. Tell us a little about how you work with this?

We’ve been working with the same design team since 2007 (shout out to Leon & Chris!), and together we create a new design concept for each year. Some elements tend to overlap, but the overall feel must be fresh for each festival. To feature cutting edge graphic design work when presenting an act is also a way to build the artist’s brand in the Swedish market, and a reason why some artists choose Way Out West. Playing the right festival at the right time can be crucial in an artist’s career, and good marketing around it can be what makes the show (and the artist’s future over here) successful in the end.

A selection of concert halls and culture houses in Sweden.

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Pär Sundström
Bassplayer, manager and lyricist
Sabaton

As a Swedish band touring worldwide – what is different on the Swedish market compared to other markets?

There are a few things that makes Sweden stand out. Rock and heavy metal is well accepted in Sweden and has a higher status than in many other countries. This has resulted in that this specific genre is more represented in the media and in the general public which in the end generates a great base for doing concerts and music consumption. The purchase power of a Swedish person is relatively strong compared to most of the world, most people are earning enough to be able to spend money on music. Also, the average Swede is more concerned in doing the right thing, meaning buying official products and not supporting bootlegging, pirate radio and illegal downloads. The same goes for the trust in the promoters and industry as there are plenty of countries where an artist cannot trust the promoters in the same way as in Sweden. This also goes for the organisation even there are other countries where this works also. When doing a concert in Sweden an artist can mostly rely on that all things are being taken care of, from security to paying the authors and publishers.

You have a huge Swedish tour coming up in May 2022 with over 30 dates with is totally unique for an internationally touring band of your calibre. Why did you choose to focus so hard and spend so much time in Sweden right now?

There are many reasons behind this. The first is that we talked for a long time about doing a very big tour in Sweden and play in cities where bands like us would normally not come, and the pandemics gave us the opportunity. Of course, the beginning of the pandemics was full of experts making statement who later proved wrong, but we still had to analyse all available information and came up with a few key things. One was that we should avoid border crossings if countries require testing before entry as that is not acceptable circumstances for a touring party of Sabatons size. Carrying over 100 people, we cannot test this amount of people every time we cross a border. We also thought that when shows grow to a certain size they put pressure on local resources such as police and healthcare workers in a different way than smaller shows so if we avoided big shows, it would be more likely that we would be allowed to do them. Another important was that authorities wanted their citizens to travel less, this we solved by travel to the fans. And during the last two years we have learned how expensive it is to cancel big tours as we need to do big deposits for buses, trucks, flights, hotels and they are not covered by insurance. But ultimately it would be awesome to visit 30 cities in Sweden and really be able to judge where the best audience for a final time. I doubt that Sabaton will be able to do something like this in the future.

Sabaton is a band that runs their own management and seems to be in control of pretty much everything concerning the band’s career. Is this something you choose from the beginning and what are the upsides and possible downsides of this approach to the industry? 

We choose this since we quickly got scared of how many bands are managed badly, this has been stronger the more involved we have become with other artists managements, so I am happy to retain the control myself. Unfortunately, there is a ladder where the artist is on the bottom, the managers are very often just tiny smarter than the band but still can take this position. But the managers are usually not as smart as the industry, we skipped one step at least. Running it ourselves comes with a lot of learning, trying, risking and more than anything else hard work. But the reward is so much higher. I have difficulty enjoying something that has been given to me without effort and I would rather fail myself than watch someone else fail on my behalf. I daily monitor our channels, streams, ticketsales, mailorder and the feedback we have in our communities. And the good thing is that I can react quickly on this. Another upside is that we own ourselves which means we can quickly do deals, licences and collaborations where other artists need to involve many parts.

- Sweden is one of only three countries that are net exporters of music.
- Sweden is by far the earliest adopter (and beneficiary) of the streaming model.
- Sweden's national publicly funded radio broadcaster Sveriges Radio consists of four different channels: P1, P2, P3 and P4. P1-P3 do all have a policy to play about 50% Swedish music. P4 focuses on Swedish music, however they still play foreign music.