An article on why so much music comes form Sweden:
Sweden by accident created unusually good conditions for musical scene creation.
What is a scene? It is a group of people who are producing work in public but aimed at each other. [Swedish bands] performed on stage — but the audience was mainly their friends who played in other bands. If they were anything like the other local scenes I’ve seen, they challenged and supported each other to be bolder, more ambitious, better.
These scenes in turn were enabled by policies that gave Swedish kids free music lessons, with the side-effect of providing young musicians with plenty of jobs teaching music.
Something similar happened in the UK in the 80s and 90s, now imagined as a golden age of making music while claiming the dole. Thatcher inadvertently helped this along. Her Enterprise Allowance Scheme, intended to help the unemployed start new businesses, became a standard route for anybody trying to make a musical career.
So just about any band which got started in the 80s or 90s – from Oasis and Pulp all the way down – spent some time on benefits at the start.