Yesterday evening, a crowded Soho House Berlin became a place to talk about what music might sound like tomorrow. SLEEK invited Swedish songwriter and Hyph Gründer Andreas Carlsson for a conversation with our Publisher Christian Bracht about an industry that has changed radically throughout Carlsson’s career and is about to change all over again.
Few people have witnessed those shifts from quite the same position. Over the past three decades, Carlsson has written songs for Britney Spears, NSYNC, Celine Dion and Katy Perry, and co-written one of pop’s most enduring hits, the Backstreet Boys’ I Want It That Way. Today, he is looking less at the songs that defined the past than at how we might make music in the future.
Between stories from his years inside the pop industry and thoughts on AI, streaming and changing listening habits, the conversation returned to one central idea: participation. With Hyph, the music creation platform Carlsson founded, he wants to make creating music almost as immediate as taking a photo on your phone. Instead of simply listening, the next generation might increasingly play, remix and create themselves.
It is a shift Carlsson approaches with curiosity rather than nostalgia. As he recently told SLEEK: “Technology always wins.” The more interesting question is what we choose to do with it.
Bringing together friends of SLEEK, music enthusiasts and curious minds, the evening felt as much like a gathering as a conversation: an intimate setting for exchanging ideas, listening to stories and thinking about where music might be heading next.
For those who missed the conversation, Carlsson also appears in our latest print issue, SLEEK #89 PLAY, where he speaks about thirty years in pop, the strange story behind I Want It That Way, AI and why the future of music might belong to billions of people making it themselves.
Thank you to everyone who joined us for the evening, and to Soho House Berlin for having us. See you at the next one!
All Photography by Lilly Wetzel.