Music for millions
Text: Heikki Uimonen
There is an antique shop on the north side of the railway line through the village of Skruv. The shop covers an area of five hundred square metres. It sells second-hand furniture and household items: tools, bolts, crockery, textiles, and so on. In the far corner is a section filled with books and a collection of a few hundred CDs and vinyl records.
On one shelf there is a collection of records packed in individual cardboard boxes titled Music of the Great Composers, En värld av melodier, Mellan Dröm och Verklighet, You 101 Favourite Melodies, The Reader’s Digest Record Library, Melodier som Bedora 1940–1949, Musik for Miljoner and Music for the Starlight Hours.
The compilations are aptly named. Like any good product name, they give the consumer a clue as to what the recordings contain. In short, they are entertainment music collections of easy-listening versions of well-known classical, popular and folk music performances. In keeping with their genre classification, they are easy to listen to and thus representative of a certain entertainment music production of the 60s and 70s. A major publisher was Reader’s Digest, which apparently also distributed its products in Sweden.
Barbro Hörberg’s Med ögon känsliga för grönt was playing in the stylish Skruf glassworks shop next door. Coincidentally, it was also released in the 1970s. Soft jazz, perfect for background music. I used the digital Shazam app to identify the digital track. You can retrieve the song and album on streaming services, download it digitally and listen to it practically anywhere, anytime.
Streamed background music has many futures, but it has no tangible past. The recycled easy-listening collections on the flea market shelves were worn around the edges; a music listener had bought them either by mail order or by visiting a record shop or a department store, and then finally put them on a turntable to play. Unlike digital music, analogue music platforms are idiosyncratic, they carry their history with them. They are material, historical, embodied and sometimes fetishised remembrances of their era.
