Abba Forever

Stockholm Museum to Offer Lots of Flair

With 370 million album sales and a musical that has been seen by 27 million people around the world, it's time for Abba to get their due. Plans are afoot for a new museum in Stockholm dedicated to one of the world's most successful and beloved pop groups.

Sweden's Fab Four: Hundreds of millions served.

Stockholm has a royal family, it's the home of IKEA and Pippi Longstocking. It has a ton to recommend it.

But it has long been lacking a touristic crown jewel to draw armies of tourists from across the globe. That, though, may change in 2008.

Friday night and the lights are low? Looking out for a place to go? The Abba Museum is coming to the Swedish capital -- a place where you can feel "young and sweet, only seventeen." At the same time, you will be able to soak up the history and music of Abba: from flaired lycra costumes to a studio where you can record your own songs by the fab four in an atmosphere that "will recreate the feeling of being at Wembly stadium and seeing Abba live with 50,000 others." Chiquitita, baby!

There are Abba compilation CDs, and there is a musical ("Mamma Mia") that is playing in 18 cities around the world, but never before has there been a museum dedicated entirely to the saccharine sweet pop music with which Abba delighted hundreds of millions of fans. "As a Stockholmer, this is what you have been missing," the city's mayor, Kristina Axen Olin, told the Associated Press. "We are convinced that this is important both for Stockholm citizens and for marketing the city."

Abba members -- Benny Andersson, Bjorn Ulvaeus, Agnetha Faltskog and Anni-Frid Reuss -- say they will make donations to the museum, but they will have no official role. And the museum itself will be privately financed.

No official location has been selected for the collection of awards, Abba fashion and historical artefacts, but the museum is already expected to draw up to 500,000 visitors a year when it opens.

Though Abba disbanded in 1982, it continues to sell an impressive 3 million records a year and has racked up an astounding 370 million album sales in the nearly 35 years since the group was created in 1972. If the plans come to fruition, the new museum sounds to us like money, money, money.

dsl/ap