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Traveling in the Footsteps of ABBA
Author(s) -
Lexhagen Maria,
Lundberg Christine,
Chekalina Tatiana
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
the journal of popular culture
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.238
H-Index - 24
eISSN - 1540-5931
pISSN - 0022-3840
DOI - 10.1111/jpcu.12859
Subject(s) - contest , tourism , popular music , media studies , history , advertising , phenomenon , musicology , art , geography , humanities , genealogy , visual arts , sociology , political science , law , physics , archaeology , quantum mechanics , business
B EFORE THE INTERNET ERA SOME OF THE MOST FAMOUS SWEDES were Bj€orn Borg, Greta Garbo, Astrid Lindgren, and of course ABBA, a legendary band in pop music history. ABBA’s international breakthrough came with winning the Eurovision Song Contest in 1974, after which it toured the world for many years, playing its last live concert in 1980. The band is closely associated with Sweden, even to the point where Swedish music was once synonymous with ABBA, and therefore attracts people’s interest in Sweden as a place to visit (Visit Sweden). Traveling in the footsteps of ABBA involves people traveling as either fans, pilgrims, concertgoers, or festival attendees and is a type of music tourism (Lashua et al. 4). Music tourism is by no means a new tourism phenomenon (Gibson and Connell 162), but tourism associated with mass-produced popular music is of course a more recent thing. The number of tourists who visit Sweden and other related sites internationally because of ABBA is unknown. In fact, there is little empirical research on music tourism in general, with the exception of