He has the 3rd-most Billboard No. 1 hits of any songwriter in history with 24, behind only Paul McCartney (32) & John Lennon (26).
He's arguably shaped culture more than any other person over the past 25 years, yet almost no one has heard of him.
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Let's back up. Until the 70s, Sweden wasn't exactly known for pop music.
Then ABBA came along. ABBA redefined Sweden's sound & laid the groundwork for a new generation.
One young Swede inspired by ABBA was Max Martin, born just as ABBA was achieving global success.
After a short stint as a musician, Max Martin turned to producing music.
In the 90s, an unknown boy band called Backstreet Boys was sent to Sweden to work with Max Martin. Martin wrote 7 of the 12 songs on their debut album, including their hit single "I Want It That Way".
The next year, a 16-year-old named Britney Spears made the journey from America to Sweden.
Max Martin wrote & produced "Baby One More Time" which sent Britney to the stratosphere.
Martin would go on to write songs like "Lucky", "Hold It Against Me", and "Oops I Did It Again".
In 2004, Kelly Clarkson made the pilgrimage to Sweden and came back with "Since U Been Gone", later voted song of the decade.
Pink followed her and got "So What" and "U + Ur Hand", both No. 1s.
Usher, Avril Lavigne, and Jessie J also all got No. 1 hits after going to Sweden.
Max Martin had become music's go-to hitmaker.
In 2010, he helped Katy Perry become the world's biggest artist. Songs he wrote for her:
I Kissed a Girl
Hot n Cold
California Gurls
Teenage Dream
ET
Last Friday Night
The One That Got Away
Roar
Wide Awake
Part of Me
Dark Horse
Two years later, Max Martin helped Taylor Swift cross over from country to pop.
They released "We Are Never Getting Back Together", which became Swift's first No. 1.
They later worked on songs like "Shake It Off", "I Knew You Were Trouble", and "Blank Space".
More recently, Max Martin has helped artists like Ariana Grande ("Dangerous Woman") and The Weeknd ("Blinding Lights") become among the world's biggest artists with No. 1 hits.
He worked on the latest albums for Adele, Justin Bieber, Ed Sheeran, and Lady Gaga.
Max Martin has written 24 Billboard No. 1 hits, most of which he's also produced. He's sold 135 million singles and won 5 Grammys.
Yet most people have never heard of him. Why?
The reason Max Martin is a little-known Swedish concept called "Jantelagen".
Jantelagen basically means that it's not within Swedish culture to brag or show off.
Max Martin is one of the foremost arbiters of popular culture, single-handedly defining music for the last generation.
And because of Jantelagen, he's happy to move culture from the background.
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Taylor Swift's Eras tour is set to make her the highest-grossing female artist of all time.
I've been thinking a lot about Taylor Swift as a businesswoman.
Let me geek out for a minute about Swift and what we can learn from her:
First, it's no secret I'm a massive Taylor Swift fan. Billy Joel said it best when he called her "The Beatles of her generation."
This is partly an excuse for me to write about my favorite artist. But you also don't have to be a fan to appreciate Swift as a savvy businesswoman:
Taylor Swift is only 33, but she's already the only woman to win three Grammys for Album of the Year.
She holds the record for most songs to ever chart on the Billboard Hot 100 (188 songs), and last fall became the first artist to own the entire Top 10 simultaneously.
A question I think about often is: is brand a moat?
My answer has always been yes, but the recent deterioration of digital advertising makes the answer even clearer.
Brand is a stronger moat than ever, and that's not a good thing:
1/ To step back, marketing, in its modern form, essentially didn’t exist before the Industrial Revolution.
There was such little product differentiation that it wasn’t necessary. Then manufacturing exploded, and production became cheaper & faster than ever before.
2/ New entrants crowded the market & marketing became essential.
Today, marketing is often *all* that distinguishes a product.
In America, kids as young as 2 can recognize brands on shelves, and by age 10 kids have recognition of 300 to 400 brands.
1/ One interesting shift: the globalization of culture.
From 2017 to 2022, 47 of the 50 most-streamed songs in the world were in English. But that dominance is slipping.
In India, Indonesia, & Korea, the share of English-language tracks has fallen from 52% to 31%.
2/ In Spain and LatAm, the share of English-language songs has slipped from 25% to 14%.
It's the same story on TV: in Argentina, Brazil, and Colombia, only about half of the most-watched shows are North American. In Japan and South Korea, it’s only 35%.
3/ We see the globalization of pop culture in what audiences are consuming:
• Squid Game (Korean) became the most-watched show on Netflix
• Khaby Lame (Senegalese-Italian) is the most-followed person on TikTok
• Bad Bunny (Puerto Rican) is the most-streamed artist on Spotify
The most powerful trend in tech right now: "The TikTokization of Everything"
How it's reshaping literally every industry:
To back up, there have been two major forces powering tech for the past decade: mobile and cloud.
Mobile facilitated the rise of massive consumer internet companies: Uber & Lyft, Instagram & Snap, Robinhood and Coinbase. Each was founded between 2009 and 2013.
Digital advertising rapidly shifted to mobile in the 2010s, and desktop-era companies like Facebook had to scramble to reinvent their businesses.