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Sweden's Cheiron studio to close STOCKHOLM, Sweden (Reuters) -
Sweden's Cheiron Studio, where artists including Britney Spears and the Backstreet Boys recorded, is scheduled to close, Radio Stockholm reported Wednesday.
``Cheiron is being shut down for emotional reasons, partly because of the death of Denniz PoP two years ago,'' studio co-owner Tom Talomaa told the radio station. PoP owned the Cheiron label until his death at age 35 from cancer. It was PoP who brought Max Martin, 29, one of Sweden's brightest record producers, into Cheiron. Martin's team produced the title track to the new Spears album ``Oops! ... I Did It Again,'' which sold 1.3 million copies in its first week, giving Spears the best debut-week album sales ever for a female artist.
Cheiron under Martin has been compared by the Los Angeles Times to a band that alternates singers -- writing the songs, playing the instruments, engineering and mixing the recordings then bringing in the artist near the end of the process. It groups six or seven producers. ``They've decided to split up and go their separate ways,'' Radio Stockholm entertainment correspondent Viktor Petrovski told Reuters. Among Martin's other hits at Cheiron were ``I Want It That Way'' by the Backstreet Boys, ``... Baby One More Time'' by Britney Spears, ``That's the Way It Is'' by Celine Dion and ``I Want You Back'' by 'N Sync. Talomaa and Cheiron were not immediately available for comment.
Cheiron is part of the Swedish pop music phenomenon that also produced ABBA and Ace of Bass -- another Cheiron name. A report last year showed that Sweden's music industry accounted for 0.5 percent of the Scandinavian country's exports. That is an estimated 1 percent of the global music market worth some $40 billion -- not bad for a country of only 8.9 million people.
