Hell, there were some nights when we ran out of beers before getting to a consensus… which is why we came up with what Lasse dubbed hemmalagen. It was a pretty simple rule.

“He who owns the hi-fi, picks the tunes,” he suggested, more than two decades ago.

(When was it—2023? 2025? Was the first pandemic over by then?)

“Or she,” Jonna had replied, waggling a finger at him.

“Or she, or they,” Lasse conceded. “In fact, for the avoidance of patriarchal influence, allow me to redraft: whosoever owns the hi-fi picks the tunes.”

“You’re only suggesting that because we’re in your apartment,” I remember saying.

“And you’re only saying that because it’s the first time you’ve been here.”

“Stop fighting, you two.” Karoline was always the peacemaker.

“I think Lasse’s idea is good. We just have to agree that it will always apply, whenever we begin an evening out at any of our apartments.”

“We already have a rule that says the host drinks for free, courtesy of the gifts of the guests,” I noted. I was studying law, and possibly taking it a little too seriously. “Is it fair that they also get to pick the music?”

“The host is free to defer some or all of the choice to any of their guests,” Lasse said. Was he making fun of my lawyer-speak? “If the guests try to influence that decision through the provision of alcohol—”

“Or other beverages!” (Jonna again.)

“—or other beverages, or snacks, or kittens or whatever else, then it is to be considered fair play.”

As we all shook on the agreement, Jonna groaned aloud in sudden realisation.

“You know what this means, don’t you?”

“I sure do,” said Lasse, leaning back with a grin. “It means anyone who doesn’t want to listen to an hour of sludgedrone before we head out had better give me a beer right now!”

#

Well, the joke was on us. Even so, credit where it’s due: Lasse always accepted the iron rule of hemmalagen after that night, as did we all. It was a good system.

Now, of course, —a quarter of a century later—it’s obsolete. Like everyone else’s, Jonna’s house systems are rigged up to authenticate people’s WSB identities. And as they do so, some clever algorithm somewhere weaves together a perfectly optimal playlist, based on the saved preferences and playback histories of everyone present.

Well, I say ‘everyone’—but not everyone is logged in. In fact, not everyone is capable of logging in. I might have guessed that Lasse would be among the one in ten people who have exercised their right to opt out of the Global Attribution User Agreement of 2044.

(I was slightly more surprised to find that Jonna had also opted out at first, but she finally signed up a couple of years back. She hasn’t yet stopped grumbling about losing the old traditions, which is what reminded me of hemmalagen. It seems crazy to me. Why would you want to go back to making group decisions without the help of algorithms?)

“Look on the bright side,” says Lasse. “No sludge-drone!”

“It feels unfair, somehow,” says Karoline.

I’m not so sure, myself. The opt-out feels to me like not voting, even when you have the option to. You’re free to make that choice, certainly—but in making it, I think you give up your right to complain about the government. By analogy, then, you give up your right to complain about the state of modern music if you’ve opted out of the GAUA.

“But he’s not complaining,” says Jonna, and I have to admit that she’s right. Lasse just shrugs, sips his beer. He looks older. I mean, we all look older than we did—but it looks to me like Lasse has taken it harder. It’s the years of blue-collar work, he claims, trying to avoid contact with algorithmic systems as much as possible. Hell of a price to pay, if you ask me... though I’m a bit envious of his waistline, or rather the lack thereof.

“Are you still playing in bands?” Jonna asks him.

“Yeah, we do house-party shows every couple of months, when we can.”

I’ve been doing law work for the World Sound Bank for nearly four years now, and we still know very little about refuseniks like Lasse. We know they exist, of course, and roughly how many of them there are... and we know what their more vocal spokespeople think of the system we took so long to build. Otherwise it’s all a bit of a mystery. I’m curious about how he and his bandmates get paid for their efforts. “In theory, it’s a bit like things used to be with Bandcamp,” he says. “You remember Bandcamp? Upload your tunes, people can stream them off the server, or pay for a download. Only now that server is in somebody’s basement in Kirseberg, for the Malmö scene at least.”

He takes a long pull at his beer.

“In practice, however” he continues, “we hardly ever get paid at all.”

“That’s a shame—you’re so talented, it seems like a waste!” (I used to think that Karro was carrying a torch for Lasse back in the day, but as the years went by, I realised she’s just like that with everyone.)

“I got a payout just last week,” she continues, “for a melody I was humming to myself while I waited for my kids to come out of förskola. Jonna used to say that I couldn’t hit the right note if you tied it to a lamppost! It seems a shame I can get paid for that, but you can spend huge chunks of your life rehearsing and recording and playing, and get nothing for it.”

It seems ridiculous to me—like cutting off your nose to spite your face, as an English colleague of mine used to say. The WSB was developed for the exact purpose of making life easier for musicians like Lasse... but typically enough, it was those same musicians who fought hardest against it when it was being put together.

“We just wanted the choice,” Lasse says. “The choice not to surrender our work to being reworked by impersonal systems. The choice to choose our own playlists.” And they got their choice, too. I should know: I was involved in building that choice into the GAUA legislation and getting it passed at the riksdag. Made everything twice as hard as it had to be, made it take twice as long, and still they’re not happy! “It’s not Lasse who’s complaining right now, Anders,” says Jonna.

She always took his side back in the old days, too.

“Come on, you lot,” says Karro. “We should get moving, unless we want to end up stood in the queue for hours.”

#

There’s no need for us to stand in the queue at all, really. I know the promoter of this evening’s show, which is how I got us all onto the guestlist—and it’s traditional that people on the guestlist can just walk to the front of the queue. But Jonna’s not having that, apparently.

“We’re not special,” she says, her arms folded. “Besides, it feels more like the old days to queue, don’t you think? When did we last queue for a show at Plan B on a Friday night?”

“GOAT, the farewell show,” says Lasse, almost instantly. Might have guessed he’d know.

“It was, wasn’t it! Wow, that was a crazy night.” Karro’s eyes are sparkling. “You were so drunk, Anders. You spent most of the night out in the smoking area.” It’s true, I did—but mostly because I never understood what the big fuss was about GOAT. They would have sounded like a cliché in 1975; to sound like that half a century later was unforgivable amateurism, really.

“And now here we are,” mutters Lasse, “in the queue for ABBA: the Punk Version.”

“The difference,” I point out, “is that ABBA’s back catalogue is timeless, and that those songs not only survive the change of genre, but bring to it a range of authentic emotion and storytelling that most punk bands couldn’t dream of delivering.”

“The difference,” Lasse responds, “is that the hedge funds who bought ABBA’s back catalogue had the money and the connections to make sure they got a consistent return on their investment. Look, I love ABBA as much as the next Swede! But the idea that authenticity and talent are the exclusive preserve of those few musicians who were incredibly commercially successful is just ridiculous.”

Of course he’d say that—like most musicians who don’t make it, but who hang on regardless, he’s bitter from chasing a dream he knows he can’t achieve. “Anders, come on now,” says Karro. “There’s no need to get so personal about it.” Oh, but there is! He’s always been laughing behind his plaid-shirted sleeve at me, but now Lasse can’t conceal the resentment any more. It’s that loser mindset, isn’t it? ‘Can’t win, why try’... but when you’re confronted with someone who’s made something of their life—who’s made a success out of actually trying to help artists get a better deal!—then out comes the same old anti-capitalist claptrap. Anything, anything is preferable to admitting they made the wrong choices, admitting they failed.

“Wow, OK.” Now he’s got his hands raised, like a confused customer in the middle of a bank robbery. “I thought we were talking about music, but the topic seems to have wandered a bit.”

“Knock it off, Anders,” says Jonna, but I want to have my point accepted. I want him to admit that the system works.

“Sure, whatever,” he says, “the system works.” And then he turns to the others and says he’s going to head off somewhere else! You’d think he’d have some gratitude—hottest ticket in town, Friday night in downtown Malmö— but apparently not.

“Some friends are doing a backyard show in Kirseberg,” he says to Jonna. “I’ll cycle up there, see if I can sit in for a few songs.”

“It won’t be a proper reunion if you’re not here,” wails Karro, and it’s all I can do not to roll my eyes.

“We can catch up again some time soon,” he says, doing the round of hugs. He puts out a hand for me to shake, looks at me silently.

I shake his hand—no point in not being the bigger man—and then he’s off, slouching away toward the back end of the queue, shoulders hunched. Well, good riddance. I’m sure there’s someone else in this queue who’ll be glad of a guestlist spot for the show.

#

The venue is jammed. Strictly within legal limits, of course—this place cleaned up its practices years ago— but in the week before midsommar, a big black box of a room containing a few thousand watts of sound system, a full holographic lighting rig and a few thousand excited punters can get pretty sweaty. It’s a mix of ages, from a few teens at one end and some real gubbar at the other, but it seems mostly to be people our age or older. Given the ticket prices, that’s not a huge surprise... and anyway, the youngsters have their own events. The busi- ness likes to keep that market separate. Nostalgia sells differently to people who don’t have many memories yet, or so they tell me.

Lucky for me that I bumped into Olaf by the merchandise stand—he’s been managing this tour, and it was him that got me the guestlist spaces. The girls have already headed down to the front of the stage—Karro has a huge crush on holo-Björn, and apparently doesn’t care who knows it—so I accept Olaf’s invitation to join him in the mixing room. He’s pretty dour company, really, but spending time with him means you get the best views in the house.

In the mixing room, the sound and light crew are busy checking their sequences, testing the amps, getting a map of the audience’s preferences from their WSB IDs. Sure, it’s “the punk version”—but everyone in that room down there will have a different idea of what that actu- ally means in the context of an ABBA tune. Where once the sound engineer for a show like this would have been balancing volume levels and EQ settings, Olaf explains, now they’re in charge of managing a huge sweep of pos- sible interpretations of every song in the set, and piping different stems—maybe a little more thrashy Steve Jones guitar here, maybe a little less D-beat from the drummer there—to different segments of the audience.

It’s a miracle of customisation, a technological marvel. I don’t pretend to understand how it works, of course; that’s not my job. But I admire the results, which are hard to argue with. Thirty years after ABBA’s final studio album—which, in its turn, came forty years after the one before it—you can still fill a room like this with a few thousand people for a five-night run of songs that were written before anyone in the audience was even born. You can do that because the songs are timeless, and—crucially—because everyone gets to hear them just as they want them to be.

How could anyone argue against that? I think of Lasse, probably sat under a cheap marquee in some Kirseberg innergård strewn with empty beer cans and vitsnus pouches, thumping away on that same ancient headless bass he bought at the pantbank when we were still at university. If he’s got an audience bigger than the band he’s playing in, I’d be genuinely surprised.

I look out of the little window of the mixing room, which is high in the back wall of the venue’s auditorium. Twenty minutes before the show’s due to start, and the crowd’s mostly facing the stage already, various groups having a warm-up bop to whatever the DJ software is piping to their headphones.

The thing is, I’m big enough to admit that Karro’s actually right about Lasse’s talent.

I mean, it’s mostly a matter of persistence. I’ve spent enough time around the music business now to know that genius is a myth made by managers, a way to sell a fairly random grab from the pile as a hero to the next coming generation of hopefuls. The difference between a hobby and a career is 75% staying in the game, and 25% saying yes when the opportunity finally comes along.

Lasse could be up there tonight, if he wanted to be. Well, OK, maybe not here—the backing music for these holo shows is entirely synthetic. But he could be uploading his ideas, his melodies, to the WSB, making a bit of money every time someone else made use of them. He could be writing for the market, instead of against it! He could be giving the people what they want!

But no—he and those like him, they argue that the reason everyone still turns out for ABBA, or for Kiss or Metallica or Taylor Swift or whoever, is because they’ve not been exposed to anything else. You can’t choose what you can’t find—that was one of the slogans their little movement had, wasn’t it?

“They’re right, in a way.” Olaf points toward the stage. “Take it from me: after thirty years running tours, no amount of custom preferences can make this crap bearable, night after night. I’d love to hear something different, even if I hated it, just for the novelty value... but we can’t play the stuff the opt-outs make, because that’s the way they want it, and the law protects their decision.”

“So we’re stuck recycling stuff that even my gran would have thought was past its sell-by date,” he continues more quietly, “because there’s nothing fresh we can pick up to replace it. Meanwhile, the opt-outs sit around at their houseparties, wishing that the so-called ‘mainstream’ would change. But if they’re not willing to let anyone hear their alternative, it never will.”

The house lights do down in the main hall, and the crowd begins to cheer as the holograms stride out onto the stage, the studs on their flared leather jumpsuits sparkling under the virtual lights.

Olaf sighs and heads for the door. “Enjoy the show,” he says, and leaves me with the techs.

I’m more likely to, now he’s gone. I slip in my earbuds, and turn my attention to the stage.

#

SOURCE SCENARIO: THE TOTAL ATTRIBUTED FUTURE AND THE WORLD SOUND BANK (WSB)

It’s a Saturday night early summer in 2050 in Malmö and we’re getting ready for a night out. As friends gather in my apartment, Google Home shifts the mood of the lighting, heating and the musical ambiance. We’re used to this. The AI powered by the World Sound Bank (WSB) seamlessly blends our musical tastes and latest playlist without us even noticing, registering our presence through our devices (except for Lasse because he has opted out of the “Global Attribution User Agreement” of 2044).

“Hey, I just got a cash in”, it must have been the baseline I tapped out yesterday while waiting for my daughter to finish her Karate practice, says Elena, referring to the financial benefits system put in place the the Global Attribution User Agreement tied to any sounds or media uploaded to the WSB. Lasse shakes his head. He’s a musician but has decided not to, as he puts it, “let his creative output be managed, used and exploited by a stupid AI puppe- teered by capitalist swines“. There’s something to that, but the convenience of having exciting new and old music, perfected to my taste, available all the time, everywhere, for a very reasonable monthly subscription (discounted by my musical input) makes it worth it.

The WSB is basically just a big server, a solution that was creat- ed at the time when omnipresent data collection had become enough of a norm, less of a threat but didn’t pay the user creat- ing the value enough credit (read money). So there it was, part of some UN-entity but so far at least, no governmental body has managed to create an interface good enough, which is why we rely on the tech giant’s solution. Basically, we here in Sweden pay for Starlink-connection, WSB and all connected services through our tax while those not in the Swedish system but physically here are either buying access on a monthly or on a top-up basis. And the real outsiders like Lasse have their own ways. Apparently there’s a local server, with a local AI, developed by some dude in Kirse- berg, where Lasse uploads his music and you pay per album (like a compilation of songs, weird I know) but that’s how they keep their music out of the system, keep their rights and authenticity.

Anyway, tonight we’re going to watch Abba - The Punk Version at Plan B, where they (their avatars, of course) will perform for four hours. Why Abba - The Punk Version? Well it was a great show on Netflix based on the catalogue, just like HBO did a show shipping Tylor The Creator and Taylor Swift called Tylor and Taylor remixing their music. Horrible, but great in a weird way.

We just love concerts, it’s a break from our screens, a time to connect physically, get drunk among other people. At the same I understand Lasse who still prefers to host shows in his basement together with other artists who have opted out. There's no digital refinement, the song can actually be really really bad (Is that on purpose? How would someone like something not perfect?) and of course the music only goes on as long as the musicians want to or can play, which usually is not long enough. A 45-minute concert seems like a joke on a night out, right? Ok, it’s intimate and nice and all, but I hate hearing songs that I cannot hear again and often are not as I like them to be.

It’s time to go, for those of us who are going to the venue. Some will remain in the safety of the apartment. Anxiety is pretty bad nowadays. “See you all the concert” we say and I add “Google, we’re heading to the concert, give everyone who wants a soundtrack on their way there”. “Okay, giving everyone a soundtrack or some peace and quiet”. “You do that, Google. You do that”.