Ulvaeus tends to live together, but still have very different views on how streaming services should work and what to pay their creators. Ulvaeus tends to speak softly and is tfore well suited for a time when the public debate on whether authors are entitled to remuneration for their work has given way to private discussions on the best way to share the spoils of the growing streaming business. But while many of the big bands of the time were still on tour, ABBA let their music, especially the songs of Ulvaeus and Andersson, take their course. In recent years in Session – formerly Auddly – Ulvaeus has played a role as an investor in the development of this kind of technology, which produces software that helps composers and musicians get the right recognition and thus compensation for their contributions to compositions and recordings. Ulvaeus also believes that a better technology could enable a “user-centred subscription model”, w services such as Spotify would distribute each consumer’s subscription fee among the songs they have heard in a given month, rather than grouping and distributing the total revenue. The special didn’t happen and the tour was postponed, but the band recorded four songs “all ABBA”, says Ulvaeus, and they all got along very well: “If I listen to a few songs a week and my neighbour plays Justin Bieber all the time, it gets incredibly unfair”, says Ulvaeus. “I tend to think that t are few creators, of course, because I’m a composer and I think in the long run we need to see better how things are divided,” Ulvaeus tells Billboard about Zoom, before his appointment becomes official. “Benny and I were lucky to have the time to perfect our art, with copyrights – and copyrights save time, and time makes you a better composer,” Ulvaeus said. “We always strive to be at the forefront of relevant technologies for creators,” said Ulvaeus, 75, who is scheduled to attend CISAC’s online general assembly, based on a selection of his speech to Billboard. CISAC – the International Confederation of Authors’ and Composers’ Associations – represents 232 associations in 120 countries around the world and is committed to increasing copyright and improving conditions for authors. “It has taught me a lot about the problems of inefficiency and outdated systems,” says Ulvaeus, calling from a comfortable chair in his apartment in Stockholm. The musical ABBA “Mamma Mia” became a hit in both West End and London Broadway – when two films and versions of “Mamma Mia! La fête” in Stockholm and London, with opening plans in Gothenburg, Sweden, and finally in New York and Las Vegas. Although ABBA is more popular in Europe than in the United States, it is one of the biggest bands of all time, with over 100 million albums sold.
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