ABSTRACT
It is hard to imagine music with no connections to concrete places or abstract spaces or both. This chapter addresses a few cases spanning the last seventy-five years of Swedish popular music going abroad, namely Alice Babs, Cornelis Vreeswijk, Abba, and Max Martin. They demonstrate different ways of going abroad and also very different ways of relating to place and space and to the nation and nationality. Discursive constructions of a musically related "Swedishness" have circulated abroad at least since the Swedish nightingale Jenny Lind toured Europe and the US in the middle of the nineteenth century. The exchange or circulation of popular music between the Scandinavian countries has been part of each country's popular-music scene. Music producers and composers are a less high-profile part of the music business. They do not need to promote their music in the same way the groups do.
