How Ace of Base Explains Everything About Luck & Success with Grant Williams & Craig Pearce | JUST PRESS RECORD

I don’t know exactly why this story became top of mind when I was talking to Grant Williams (TTMYGH, ex-Real Vision, etc.) and Craig Pearce (physical book nerd/publisher, Harriman House guy, aka the reason you know Morgan Housel, etc.), but I ended up telling them this crazy “how Ace of Bass got discovered” story and - somewhere between smash hit cultural products and a frustratingly high amount of market-driven luck, I think you’ll get it.

So Denniz PoP, who - don’t worry - you’ve never heard of, was a Swedish super-producer who ultimately helped put Max Martin on the map. Martin's a god amongst men, which makes Denniz’s Swedish origins and success despite his (let’s be honest, kind of corny) “stylized” name even more fascinating.

Denniz was a known entity, and a then unknown band from around the way named Ace of Base sent him a demo. He got the tape, threw it in his car stereo, and pressed play. “Mr. Ace” was the song. He thought it was, “meh.”

He pressed eject and… nothing happened.

The demo got stuck. So for the next few days and then weeks, every time Denniz got into his car to go somewhere, he heard the song, and it started to grow on him. Maybe it wasn’t so bad. Maybe this song had some structure to it, and it was catchy, and if anybody was going to do something with it, it was him, right?

Like most demos and blind submissions, Denniz had kept the source but immediately lost/tossed the contact information. This presented a problem. Meanwhile, Ace of Base, from their side of town was feeling dejected. As a last ditch effort, they put in a phone call to see if he ever heard the demo, to which he said, “YES,” and then invited them to his studio to record and re-title their song as “All That She Wants.”

It was a little bit of a hit. It reached number one on charts around the world and if you were around in 1993/1994, you already have it playing in your head. All because the tape got jammed in the right person’s car cassette deck.

Grant Williams has had his share of market luck, market skill, and excuses to write extensively about the gaps between the two, all over the world. When he came on Just Press Record, he talked about how “talent + opportunity + luck” is the only honest formula for explaining cultural hits.

But here’s the thing Grant said that really wormed its way into my ears, “You can’t pick it, but you know it when you see it. And I think if we could explain it, that would negate the chance of something like Harry Potter making it, because if we could explain it, everybody would be writing Harry Potter books and you’d get lost.”

Ace of Base - and that story - matters because randomness isn’t a bug you want to squash out of a system. It’s not a shortcut for AI to solve. It’s all a feature. The stuck tape isn’t just lucky, it’s the exact kind of accident that prevents the music industry (and any market) from becoming completely predictable and formulaic.

Craig Pearce knows something about this topic too. Morgan Housel is his Ace of Base in so many ways. And, godspeed on repeating it (which is part of the Max Martin connection that got me to the Ace of Base story, there’s the connection!). Craig explained how in the publishing industry, “It doesn’t matter about the content of a thing, it matters how it’s perceived.”

Perception, I get that. But he went deeper, making it even more sobering with, “Publishing’s changed. It used to be you write a book to become known. Now you become known, then you write the book.” That has to influence both the predictability and the formula somehow.

In the days of Harper Lee, she got a Christmas check from her neighbor to just go write the book already, and that’s how we got To Kill a Mockingbird. That era is over. Craig gets 120+ book proposals a year and publishes maybe 25-30. He’s not looking for an accidental masterpiece. he’s looking for authors who already have platforms with upside skew.

And that's how Morgan Housel - relatively known in finance circles but maybe not yet a household name - becomes The Psychology of Money phenomenon. All because somebody like Craig saw the sign (I couldn't resist, sorry).

Here’s what both Grant and Craig understand that the “snackable content” and AI-summarized crowd doesn’t: even in our hyper-connected, algorithmically-driven world, the best stories still require what Grant calls, “That combination of real talent and opportunity and - just pure dumb luck.”

The Ace of Base tape got jammed in a tape deck just over 30 years ago. Today, that same demo would be uploaded to Bandcamp or Spotify alongside 100,000 other tracks from that day alone, and it would promptly disappear into the endless shelf space of the algorithmic void.

Sometimes the inefficiencies - the stuck tapes, the lost contact info, the serendipitous meetings - create the very frictions that allow genuine discoveries to happen. The delay forces repetition, the urgency creates action, the breakdown becomes the breakthrough.

Who better to talk these things out than a person who has been writing about market inefficiencies for years and a publisher who has made a career out of hacking his own long-shot successes in an industry everybody else thinks is dying?

Maybe the lesson isn't to chase luck, but to create more opportunities for meaningful accidents. You know, like introducing two strangers on a video call and just pressing record. Because in a world optimized for instant everything, the best stories might still be hiding in the places where the system breaks down just enough to let something unexpected through.