Helienne Lindvall Helienne Lindvall is an award-winning professional songwriter, musician and columnist, and is Chair & Board Director of the Ivors Academy of Music Creators (formerly British Academy of Songwriters, Composers & Authors BASCA). She’s also the writer behind the Guardian music industry columns Behind the Music and Plugged In and is the former Head of Business & Songwriter relations for song data management platform Auddly/Sessions, backed by hitmakers Max Martin and Abba’s Björn Ulvaeus, and Director of Business Development and Artist Relations, LANDR UK. Hailing from Sweden, she worked as a session singer, recording artist and performer in Stockholm and NYC before settling in London, where she signed a publishing deal with BMG Scandinavia and, later, Universal Music Publishing Scandinavia. Since then she’s been working with recording artists on both sides of the Atlantic, including Roger Sanchez, Sunloverz, Big Daddy Wilson and the Dark Tenor, collaborating with award-winning writers including Jörgen Elofsson (Kelly Clarkson, Britney Spears), Patrik Berger (Icona Pop, Robyn) and Steve McEwan (Kenny Chesney, Carrie Underwood). In 2016, her song A Better Man, co-written by Andrew Fromm (Backstreet Boys, Mark Anthony) and Peter Kvint (A-ha, Andreas Johnson) made the UK Eurovision finals. Helienne contributed a chapter for the Swedish book Myten om Internet (The Myth of the Internet), published August 2012. She’s also written for Digital Music News, Netopia, The Musician, The Australian and STIM-Magasinet, and regularly appears on Sky News, the BBC, Irish National Radio and Swedish National Radio, discussing songwriters’ rights, copyright and other music industry issues. She's a regular expert panelist and moderator at music industry conferences such as Eurosonic (Groningen, Netherlands), Reeperbahn (Hamburg, Germany), Slush (Helsinki, Finland), BY:Larm (Oslo, Norway) and SPOT (Aarhus, Denmark). Despite the pandemic, it's been a busy year for Helienne. Her regular master classes for music colleges – including Paul McCartney's LIPA, BIMM and Goldsmiths – were moved online, and she continued collaborating on several music projects over the internet with releases from her collaborations with electronic acts Glass Keys, Richard Adlam, Bondax, Dani Senior and Menrva being imminent. She finished off the year by narrating the BBC programme New Song about how streaming has affected the art of songwriting: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000qjfd Helienne Lindvall on BBC World: Songwriters take on tech giants: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLU2zHWsE84&t=78s Helienne on Sky News on how the economical climate is affecting music creation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nIHqaE_8TIQ&t=2s Helienne on BBC Newsnight, debating Spotify: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFS0fihgt5c&t=22s&index=4&list=PL937BB19516936E3E Helienne discussing music's metadata issues at the EU High-Level Conference on Data Economy 2019 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=im8yP54k03g Helienne's Guardian columns: http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/heliennelindvall