TEN MUSIC GROUP


You might not know their names, but you definitely know their music. Meet TEN MUSIC GROUP, Stockholm’s multifaceted music label and production house behind a surprising number of your favorite songs, including Icona Pop’s delightfully shouty club hit “I Love It” and, thanks to Elof Loelv’s production, Rihanna’s spare ballad “Stay.” TEN has built its considerable reputation on Swedish talent, including Icona Pop, Niki & the Dove, Erik Hassle, Elliphant, and more.

The secret sauce behind TEN’s success has been open doors and collaboration, senior vice president Adis Adamsson says from his hotel room in Paris, where he is overseeing the video shoot for Icona Pop’s latest single, “Just Another Night.” “We were looking at old labels like Motown and those kinds of labels where they had a different approach,” he explains. “The music was the heart and the studios, songs, producers, and songwriters—there was a sense of a family, a community where you were fighting against the world, kind of.”

The TEN family is, however, getting international. Adamsson’s goal for this year is to find more American talent to bring into his Swedish family. He’s renting a big house for his producers in Los Angeles and setting up shop stateside: “We want to sign American artists, producers, and songwriters to mix up with our Swedish talent. No one really did that before from Sweden.”

But for now, Adamsson, yawning in the Paris pre- dawn, is getting ready to meet Icona Pop and then take over the world one step at a time: “We’re going to have a really late dinner, drink a couple absinthes, then I have a really early flight to Stockholm for some producer meetings. Then I’ll spend a little time with my wife. And then I go to work on Monday.”

For more information, please visit TEN.se.

Zachary Sniderman is the associate editor of The Last Magazine.

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