How popular were ABBA in USA during 70s?

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Texan2116@reddit

ABBA was very popular w girls, or ladies, Men, not so much.

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Effective_Coach7334@reddit

Oh please. I still love Abba since I was a child.

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Scratocrates@reddit

This is like when someone says "Men on average are taller than women" and someone else interjects "But I know a couple where the woman is taller than the man."

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beyphy@reddit

Because men's liking of ABBA on average is measurable just like height right? Lol.

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Effective_Coach7334@reddit

That's a perfect description of your comment, I couldn't have done better. lol

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Scratocrates@reddit

Uhh... my comment? It's a description of your comment.

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beyphy@reddit

I'm a man in his 30s and I like ABBA now lol

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pinniped90@reddit

Guy in my 50s. I like them, but my teenage daughters LOVE them.

We spent 3 days in Stockholm - one of my favorite cities in the world - and the thing they remember most is the ABBA museum.

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icyDinosaur@reddit

To be fair, I remember the ABBA museum being pretty good too!

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EulerIdentity@reddit

Wait, there’s an ABBA museum in Stockholm?

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pinniped90@reddit

Yes.

Past the Vasa museum (also totally worth it) and before the amusement park.

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Muvseevum@reddit

Guy here who loved ABBA as well as the Sex Pistols.

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Ceorl_Lounge@reddit

Ooof this guy's loved Abba since I was a kid. Mama Mia makes me cringe painfully though.

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FeralGiraffeAttack@reddit

Mama Mia came out in 2008 and ABBA is the entire soundtrack, They were always popular

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Medical-Pace-8099@reddit (OP)

I meant in 70s. They did have renew interest after broadway and film Mamma Mia

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Buddy, the point is they were popular in the 70s, 80s, 90s, 00s, 10s, 20s and so on. They were popular enough 30 years after they were “big” that an entire movie’s soundtrack was dedicated to them. People have always know who ABBA was. They were that one Swedish group we all knew

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damutecebu@reddit

I would definitely say they fell off quite a bit between the 70s / early 80s and when Mamma Mia debuted.

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shelwood46@reddit

I was a teen in the 80s, I vaguely remember that after they broke up, the brunette woman had a video hit, with Phil Collins, though I don't think it burned up the radio charts.

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damutecebu@reddit

“I Know There’s Something Going On”. A fairly popular song.

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Medical-Pace-8099@reddit (OP)

I heard that after ABBA split in USA they fell a little bit in popularity

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Scrappy_The_Crow@reddit

I heard that after ABBA split in USA they fell a little bit in popularity.

That's normal when a musical group breaks up. It'd be rare for their airplay and sales to increase.

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VastAd6069@reddit

they were definitely popular in the US just not huge like in Europe

ABBA had big hits like Dancing Queen but a lot of their other songs didn’t dominate the charts the same way

part of it was image tbh, at the time the US leaned more into rock and their polished pop + accents got labeled as kinda cheesy. plus they barely toured the US which made a big difference

so they were known and liked just not a full on cultural obsession there back then

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wjbc@reddit

This. In the U.S. ABBA had 14 top 40 singles, so they were well known. But they only had one number one single and their albums were not as popular as their singles. Their music was perceived as catchy but not cool.

Their 1992 greatest hits album Gold: Greatest Hits revived their popularity. Then the musical Mamma Mia! premiered in London in 1999 and on Broadway in 2001, and the rest is history.

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No-Pickle-8200@reddit

I also worked in theater in the early 2000s, and us theater kids had the Priscilla Queen of the Desert soundtrack in heavy rotation. The movie was a cult classic, for sure, and heavily featured ABBA’s music.

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shelwood46@reddit

Another Aussie movie of the same era, Muriel's Wedding, also featured ABBA prominently.

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No-Pickle-8200@reddit

Also a great one!!!

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Vyckerz@reddit

This is 100% true in general, but in retrospect many people are acknowledging that some of their songs were pretty great.

I mean notoriously critical, Pete Townsend of The Who, once famously said that SOS was the best Pop ever written.

I know for myself I was one of those that was into the heavier rock bands of the era, but in later years really came to appreciate some of ABBA’s better songs.

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wjbc@reddit

For many American ABBA may have been a guilty pleasure, but it didn’t translate into record sales until the greatest hits album came out in the 1990s.

I think a lot of people missed the melancholy expressed in their later songs, in particular, such as “The Winner Takes It All” (1980), “Slipping Through My Fingers” (1981), “One of Us” (1981), and “The Day Before You Came” (1982). Only “The Winner Takes It All” charted in the U.S. and it peaked at #8. In the U.S. they were typecast by “Dancing Queen.”

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Quirky_Commission_56@reddit

Enough for me to know about them, and I wasn’t born until ‘75.

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frisky_husky@reddit

Their style of disco/dance pop was already falling out of fashion in the US by the time ABBA was at their peak in Europe for reasons that have a lot to do with a sharp conservative backlash against that scene, which was associated with both gay men and drug use, starting in the mid-1970s, as the Christian right began its ascent to political dominance.

They were certainly popular here (especially among the gay community and others with a camp sensibility) but not a cultural touchstone the way they were over there. Honestly, it wasn't really until Mamma Mia! came out that ABBA really became universally known in the States, and achieved the cultural status they hold today.

As with many things that are seen as outdated when they come onto the scene, ABBA's music was reevaluated later without the burden of having to align with the current taste.

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Medical-Pace-8099@reddit (OP)

Well only like 4 songs charted in USA billboard Hot 100. Then MTV and new type of music genre start to dominate

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frisky_husky@reddit

Yes, but even before MTV the style of music ABBA made was out of fashion in the US.

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Medical-Pace-8099@reddit (OP)

Which year do you think was a moment when in US those type of songs were considered outdated?

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frisky_husky@reddit

The culture was moving on by 78-79 (culminating in the famous Disco Demolition Night riot in Chicago), and disco was already basically dead in the US by the time MTV launched in 81. Frankly, dance music has always been a Black-dominated genre in the US, and this was particularly true in the 70s. Four Scandinavians with funny accents and cryptic lyrics were just a little out of step with where American tastes were at the time--in a sense they were both a little ahead of and a little behind the American music industry, which was still focused on albums over singles (though ABBA's albums sold quite well here).

It's also worth noting that there were a LOT of major artists in the US at the same time who got no traction in Europe. It wasn't until the 80s that the music industries on the two continents started to converge around specific artists, not just stylistic trends. ABBA was really the first English-language act to dominate Continental Europe, and the first act from a non-Anglophone country to break into the English-speaking market to such a degree.

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Weightmonster@reddit

Popular.

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Cinisajoy2@reddit

14 top 40 singles is considered awesome. So they were popular.

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TrillyMike@reddit

I know Dancing Queen did numbers, I know every word due to my momma

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sneakysalamander69@reddit

It’s well known but not huge but its super popular with gay men

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Warm_Objective4162@reddit

The US was sorta divided on music, with “Disco Sucks” being a big movement.

That being said, I was fired from my one of my first jobs (in 2004!) for saying that nobody likes ABBA, so there were definitely big fans. My boss was crazy for them and didn’t take the dig lightly.

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MalevolentRhinoceros@reddit

A lot of the 'disco sucks' movement was directly misogynistic. Disco was vastly more popular with women than men, and it also had roots in feminism and women's liberation. It's similar to the people who complain about pumpkin spice lattes today: it's not about the coffee.

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OnionLayers49@reddit

Hey, wait a minute! I’m a feminist, and I hate pumpkin spice anything. Sometimes it’s really just about the coffee…

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MyUsername2459@reddit

There's a lot of things people SAY disliking them are about racism and feminism. . .but sometimes it's just because they suck.

I used to get a lot of flak online for saying I didn't like the Disney Star Wars sequels, with people CONSTANTLY saying I was misogynistic for disliking The Force Awakens.

Eventually people simmered down after The Last Jedi came out, but when I would explain why I didn't like The Force Awakens I had people tell me I was lying and that there was no reason, in good faith, to dislike that movie. . .and when I would give reasons people would say they were just excuses, because supposedly ONLY misogynists would dislike the film.

There was also a lot of "if you dislike this movie, it's because you're misogynist" about the Ghostbusters remake in 2016, and people who simply wouldn't accept any criticism of it. . .if it had a female lead, then it was above criticism and any criticism was treated as just misogyny.

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Practical-Ordinary-6@reddit

I didn't like the movie and it had nothing to do with politics or feminism. I waited 32 years to see a new movie and they took my money (probably three times more at that point) and showed me the same movie I'd already seen in the '70s five times. I honestly felt cheated. Partway through the movie, when it clicked what they were doing, I shook my head in disappointment and disgust. As far as I was concerned it was a waste of time so I didn't see the other two and nothing I've read about them makes me think that was mistake.

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MalevolentRhinoceros@reddit

I'm a feminist, and it's not my favorite. I don't like shellfish either, though, and I don't openly complain about crawfish boils and crab/lobster season. Having personal preferences is fine; the trend about complaining loudly about *specific things* is the problem.

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Responsible-Care-388@reddit

It was racism and homophobia too because the gay and black communities were into it as well, and the culture was a way for them all to bond.

A lot of it reminds me of how online (even today) you have a lot of people complain about rap/hip hop music who also don’t listen to it.

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Muvseevum@reddit

I was team Disco Sucks, but that was because disco was anathema to the DIY punk aesthetic I was into at the time.

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MalevolentRhinoceros@reddit

"I like everything except rap and country" says a whole lot about elitism.

(Yeah, there's a lot in both genres that's bad. There's also a lot of shitty rock out there. Writing off an entire genera just because it's from Those People is a dangerous mindset.)

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Responsible-Care-388@reddit

Yep, and my comment was downvoted within a minute of posting it lol. People on here don’t like being called out.

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christine-bitg@reddit

While that's all true, I think you have to admit that the lyrics of Waterloo are very far from being feminist.

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Sublime99@reddit

Fired for not liking ABBA? To each their own but that’s wild

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Professional-Front58@reddit

There are a lot of music acts that are popular in Europe that don’t chart in the US (some of them are US acts! David Hasslehof is famous for being an actor over here… and a joke that he was hugely popular as a musician in Germany for reasons that escape us.).

ABBA had a number of well known songs in the US and is a house hold name in the states. That’s a success many over seas acts would be jealous of.

The likely reason is the Hollywood music industry is one of the most cutthroat of the entertainment industry and you have to compete in a market space with American acts.

Most Foreign acts that have any success in the US have one song and it’s typically one song and with rare exception it needs to be in English. Out side of Spanish language songs, I think outside “99 Luftballoons” by Nena is the only song to chart in the US in its native language (most Americans will agree that the English language “99 Red Balloons” is the lesser version even if the don’t speak German.). It also bares mentioning that a lot of Spanish Language music has a better chance of making it big in the US because the Latin American Media capital of the world is Miami, Florida. Most of the people who know how to get songs on the American radio can easily access Spanish language music and meet with the labels without leaving the country.

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ELMUNECODETACOMA@reddit

I am really shocked by this: Falco's "Der Kommissar" was all over MTV in 1982, but it didn't even make the Hot 100.

Also, similar to Nena, Peter Schilling had both English and German versions of "Major Tom (Coming Home)" but in his case it was the English version that charted.

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WFOMO@reddit

"Sukiyaki" by Sakamoto was released in the original Japanese and stayed at #1 for 3 weeks., but you're right...there weren't many.

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Strict-Potato9480@reddit

I had Burger King Abba drinking glasses, so...pretty popular in my area. At least Shrek level!

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Great_Chipmunk4357@reddit

Not nearly as popular as they were in Europe. They weren’t nearly “cool” enough.

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HorrorAlarming1163@reddit

Sort of off topic but “Fernando” had a small resurgence earlier this year because the quarterback at the university of Indiana is named Fernando Mendoza and he lead them to their first college football national championship.

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jessek@reddit

They were popular but weren’t crazy popular like they were in Europe.

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lisasimpsonfan@reddit

I was born in 1971. My Dad hated disco with a passion so I never really heard much of it as a kid. I would get exposed to it in movies and on TV but that was about it. The only ABBA I remember is Dancing Queen.

My Dad switched to Country when Disco became popular and I am still a big fan.

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RobotShlomo@reddit

I was a little kid, but I remember them being fairly popular when the disco craze hit. That didn't last long.

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pinniped90@reddit

Don't recall the 70s but I can say in the early 90s they were regular fare at parties and discos.

I don't think they were mega huge like in Europe but everybody knew their songs and they have huge staying power today (Broadway definitely helped).

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DickWhittingtonsCat@reddit

TLDR: Abba was successful in the US with a #1 hit in 74 and a lone tour that sold 107,000 tickets (7600 per night) over 14 US dates in 1979.

Abba had 20 charting US singles, a number 1 in Dancing Queen that was top of the charts for 1 week. They had 4 top 10 hits.

While more than a rounding error, compared to the Beegees Abba were something of a pop-friendly radio act.

The Beegees had a totally sold out 1979 Tour, that after some cancellations was 49 shows and 800k tickets sold- over twice the average attendance .

The Beegees had 43 charting singles, 9 Billboard #1 songs (for a total of 27 weeks) and 15 top 10 hits .

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There was no Eurovision or cable in US. Here is a very quick snapshot comparing ABBA’s US success to a couple contemporary acts competing for airtime and concert ticket sales.

To be clear, I find Abba delightful and it’s amazing they are basically the head cannon theme music for so many millennial ladies born after the band split.

Live Concerts

Abba had one US tour in 1979. They played 14 shows in US and drew around 107,000 fans. Dont know how papered over that tour was with giveAways, radio station promos and sponsors. Practice was that 10% or more got in for free at the bigger venues at time or the nose bleeds were priced super cheap, with booze sales going to the promoter. We will skip that as unknowable but someone has a a story with that I’d love to hear.

The most comparable act as far as demo and style was the Beegee’s Spirits Tour also in 1979. But it paints a very dour scene and makes Abba look like one-hit wonder bush leaguers to compare the Abba 79 to the Beegees.

Abba played were smaller venues in general not full blown hockey stadiums (exceptions of course) across the board and only a couple appeared to have not sold out. They averaged about 7k fans per event

The Beegees sold out every seat and averaged 16k fans per night in 49 shows

Upshot is the Beegees whose tour grossed 10 million dollars and sold 8x more tickets in the US.

Abba was also not even close to being on the level of Foreigner as a draw, which their breakout Double Vision tour was also contemporaneous with ABBA.

Foreigner got top billing over the Stones at JFK in Philly and drew nearly as many people as Abba did total in 14 dates at just one show- granted the stones were there two as the secondary headliner.

They did a lot more double headliner shows, so it’s not worth parsing that data but it does mean twice as many people saw Foreigner at one California festival as saw Abba period in the US in the history of the band’s live performances.

So that is your context. more people listened to the Grateful Dead run into early sound issues at Englishtown in 1977 than ever saw Abba sing and dance here.

As far as purely European Acts making a play for US dollars in late 1970s. The Wings Tour of 1976-77 dwarfed Abba’s tour in drawing power and revenue.

Abba also played 2 concerts in Canada and sold 27,000 seats in comparison (Toronto 17k sellout and 10k at the Montreal Forum)

Note that they played for 48k in Wembley and 72k at rhe Budokan in Japan- combined more than Americans that saw them in weeks on the road, but their general shows in Europe were at similar sized venues to US- hockey arenas or smaller.

They had a decent sized backup band but it wasn’t a stadium show and in fact you can find complaints about the sound clarity in reviews of the US shows on newspapers.com

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Radio Play

So if they weren’t a tour de force on the road in US, how did they do on the radio.

The billboard numbers from time are easier to find- they were viewed unfairly as more of a gimmick and pop radio act in the US than a serious musical group.

Dancing Queen in 1977 was #1 on the billboard and stuck around for 22 weeks on the charts- not #1 just the charts. Take a Chance (#3, 18 weeks in 78), Waterloo (#6, 17 weeks in 1974) and Winner Take All(#8, 26 weeks in fall 1981) cracked the top 10. Their albums all hit platinum.

I’m again gonna look at Foreigner from that era. The never had a #1, unlike Dancing Queen but had 6 songs in the top 6 between 78 and 81- their #1 song (for 2 weeks) not coming until 1988.

Might as well address the big dog in this scenario: the Beegees had nine number one hits and 15 top 10 hits in US

Keep in mind cable wasn’t even a thing most people knew about during Eurovision Waterloo.

A fancy city person might have some cool UHF stations, WGN Dumont and PBS to watch. Most the country was catching the big 3 only.

Ifyou listened to FM radio, liked pop music and disco and were a female under born between 1950 and 1972, you likely enjoyed the musical stylings of Abba but not enough to spend money on it.

Their museum might have more granular information but that’s the starting point for the US perspective then: A catchy but possible one hit wonder disco-dance troupe from Sweden.

Abba was much more than that we know and it’s hard to explain how much more diffuse pop culture is today than back then.

And how being a pop radio hit first rather than a live act probably helped their later legend- because the US and UK were still leaning hard into music is your social identity, where fans of bands basically wear a uniform like latter day Mods and Greasers, or grunge/goth/hippie/hiphop/metal/queer coded musical posturing that was huge basically until Napster pulled the rug out from under it

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alaskawolfjoe@reddit

In the 70s they were well known and heard often. But they were a bit of a joke like the Starland Vocal Band and Musak. People listened, but most were ashamed to say they listened to ABBA.

In the 90s they were reframed by Muriel's Wedding, Mama Mia, and nostalgia. They became more widely popular then and less of a guilty pleasure.

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Dazzling-Astronaut88@reddit

I was born in 1975. My mom absolutely loved ABBA and listened to them constantly on 8 tracks when I was young. That being said, it wasn’t lost on me that I wasn’t exposed to ABBA elsewhere. They had no rotation by the time 80s soft or pop rock radio came around and certainly were considered dinosaurs by MtTv standards once that launched in 1981. For reference, ABBA’s peak success was 1977, so not a huge timeline gap, though the disco sound fell out of favor quickly. I wouldn’t describe myself as a fan by any stretch, though, by the standards of modern pop music, the talent level, production and playing is all very high quality. You’d be extremely hard pressed to recreate ABBA recordings using only 1970s technology.

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Medical-Pace-8099@reddit (OP)

So when MTV debuted different music was dominating in 80s so ABBA song were not heard very much

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Dazzling-Astronaut88@reddit

Correct. Some of that was shifting trends and influence with MTV pushing new wave, progressive pop and heavier music. Some of that was disco backlash. Some of it was also disco fatigue. People who lament disco’s death knell, some of whom are commenting on this post, often leave that detail out and blame it squarely upon misogyny and homophobia. Certainly factors, but cultural fatigue was likely just as relevant. Grunge and NuMetal trends didn’t last any longer than Disco did.

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mobyhead1@reddit

Popular enough that even my WWII-veteran father had their records/cassettes and even made a mixtape.

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purplishfluffyclouds@reddit

ABBA was VERY popular!

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Effective_Coach7334@reddit

It still is

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Effective_Coach7334@reddit

They are still very popular in America

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ApprehensiveSkill573@reddit

Pretty popular. They were definitely big.

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NoFanksYou@reddit

They were popular in the 70’s. I heard them on the radio all the time

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Quirky-Invite7664@reddit

Same

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heybud_letsparty@reddit

They are popular right now with people in their 20s. They seem to get put on the jukebox at any bar I got to with a younger crowd.

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Minute_Point_949@reddit

They were popular, they were on the radio all the time, but they definitely had a different sound from what was topping the charts. My guess is they were just slightly different than what the US public was used to.

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Virtual_Win4076@reddit

It was pop music, we didn’t consider ABBA to be rock which most of us liked back then. They had catchy songs though.

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ActuaLogic@reddit

They were popular on the radio and in places like singles bars, including reaching number 1 on the Billboard top 100 with Dancing Queen.

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Delicious_Oil9902@reddit

More popular than Blue Swede

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JayStoleMyCar@reddit

My mom was a big disco girl so she loved them

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ggrandmaleo@reddit

They were more successful than some will admit. I can't say I was a fan, but when I saw Mamma Mia, I knew all the words to every damn song. That's just from casually listening to the radio at work.

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Hey-Bud-Lets-Party@reddit

They were not huge but were well known. Some people liked them and others couldn’t stand them. They didn’t really start becoming cool in the U.S. until the early ‘90s when a lot of alternative acts sung their praises. The same stamp of approval happened for The Carpenters around the same time.

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allaboutaphie@reddit

Personally, never liked ABBA, but to each their own.