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MUSIC

Spotify chief unveils Sweden innovation bash

Spotify founder Daniel Ek and Avicii's manager Ash Pournouri are set to launch a major new tech and music event to reflect Stockholm's status as a lucrative hive of start-up activity, Billboard reports.

Published: 27 April 2015 16:07 CEST
Spotify chief unveils Sweden innovation bash

The US magazine predicts that Symposium Stockholm will be a sort of Nordic version of South by Southwest, the creative industries shindig held annually in Austin, Texas.  

The Stockholm event's organizers said Symposium would be "a meeting ground for the world’s most innovative individuals to come together and experience the creative capital of the world – Stockholm, Sweden". 

In a hectic week running from June 8th to 13th, Stockholm will play host to the Denniz Pop Awards, the Polar Music Prize, Polar Talks, the Scandinavian Music Summit, Avicii Fest, and Summerburst, a festival that attracts 70,000 revellers, "alongside numerous dinners, artist showcases, receptions and after-parties."

The event's centrepiece, the Brilliant Minds Conference on June 11th and 12th, will "bring together the world’s leaders in music, media and technology along with Swedish legends and her newest talents, in closed-door forums." 

Abba's Björn Ulvaues, Skype co-founder Niklas Zennström and Ericsson chief executive Hans Vestberg are all expected to take part in the conference, Billboard said. 

 

Symposium Stockholm – Welcome to the creative capital of the world from At Night Studios on Vimeo.

Daniel Ek points to Sweden as a place where streaming has already accelerated past more traditional media consumption in a lot of cases, and wants to explore how this behavioural shift can boost creativity. 

“A lot of that dialogue seems to be happening in the U.S., but if you’re a technology executive and you want to see how rapidly something can get adopted, look to Sweden, which has the third-highest per capita usage of new technologies,” he told Billboard.

 "Stockholm is one of the absolutely top start-up cities in the world," Jessica Stark, CEO and co-founder of start-up co-working space SUP46, told The Local recently.

A recent report from Atomico revealed that Stockholm had the largest number of billion dollar start-ups in Europe, Stark said.

"Per capita Stockholm is second in the world after Silicon Valley."

READ MORE: Swedish startup stories 

CULTURE

New songs mark sixth anniversary of French star Johnny Hallyday’s death

Fans of the late Johnny Hallyday, "the French Elvis Presley", will be able to commemorate the sixth anniversary of his death with two songs never released before.

Published: 17 November 2023 09:05 CET
New songs mark sixth anniversary of French star Johnny Hallyday's death

Hallyday, blessed with a powerful husky voice and seemingly boundless energy, died in December 2017, aged 74, of lung cancer after a long music and acting career.

After an estimated 110 million records sold during his lifetime – making him one of the world’s best-selling singers -Hallyday’s success has continued unabated beyond his death.

Almost half of his current listeners on Spotify are under the age of 35, according to the streaming service, and a posthumous greatest hits collection of “France’s favourite rock’n’roller”, whose real name was Jean-Philippe Leo
Smet, sold more than half a million copies.

The two new songs, Un cri (A cry) and Grave-moi le coeur (Engrave my heart), are featured on two albums published by different labels which also contain already-known hits in remastered or symphonic versions.

Un cri was written in 2017 by guitarist and producer Maxim Nucci – better known as Yodelice – who worked with Hallyday during the singer’s final years.

At the time Hallyday had just learned that his cancer had returned, and he “felt the need to make music outside the framework of an album,” Yodelice told reporters this week.

Hallyday recorded a demo version of the song, accompanied only by an acoustic blues guitar, but never brought it to full production.

Sensing the fans’ unbroken love for Hallyday, Yodelice decided to finish the job.

He separated the voice track from the guitar which he felt was too tame, and arranged a rockier, full-band accompaniment.

“It felt like I was playing with my buddy,” he said.

The second song, Grave-moi le coeur, is to be published in December under the artistic responsibility of another of the singer’s close collaborators, the arranger Yvan Cassar.

Hallyday recorded the song – a French version of Elvis’s Love Me Tender – with a view to performing it at a 1996 show in Las Vegas.

But in the end he did not play it live, opting instead for the original English-language version, and did not include it in any album.

“This may sound crazy, but the song was on a rehearsal tape that had never been digitalised,” Cassar told AFP.

The new songs are unlikely to be the last of new Hallyday tunes to delight fans, a source with knowledge of his work said. “There’s still a huge mass of recordings out there spanning his whole career,” the source said.

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