Abba fans who already own all of the group’s CDs and DVDs and have seen Mamma Mia! numerous times, but who still want to affirm their devotion to the Swedish superstars, will soon have a museum in Stockholm to visit.

The museum is expected to attract half a million visitors a year when it opens in 2008. “This is what Stockholmers have been missing,” said Kristina Axen Olin, the city’s Mayor. “We are convinced that the museum is important, both for Stockholm citizens and for marketing the city.”

The group leapt to fame by winning the 1974 Eurovision Song Contest in Brighton with Waterloo. “Since Waterloo, the group has become a global phenomenon rather than a purely Swedish one,” said a Swedish tourism executive. “We want to bring Abba home.”

Fan websites and chat rooms have been lobbying for years to persuade Stockholm to become a Scandinavian version of Liverpool, with an Abba showcase to rival the Beatles Museum. Some even want Stockholm’s Arlanda airport be renamed Abba airport or, more confusingly, Waterloo.

Abba have sold 370 million albums — fewer only than Elvis and the Beatles — and continue to sell three million records a year. The Mamma Mia! musical has been seen by more than 20 million people worldwide since opening in London in 1999, and a film version directed by Tom Hanks is due next year.

Ulf Westman and Ewa Wigenheim-Westman, the museum founders, said that they came up with the idea after visiting Liverpool’s shrine to the Beatles. It then took them two years to convince the group’s four members — Björn Ulvaeus, Benny Andersson, Agnetha Fältskog and Anni-Frid Lyngstad — that a museum was a worthwhile idea.

Mr Westman said that it would be an interactive experience and would include a studio where visitors could record their own version of Abba songs. He wanted to “re-create the feeling of being at Wembley Stadium and seeing Abba live with 50,000 others”.

The four group members said in a joint statement: “It is nice that someone feels compelled to take on our musical history. We have a lot of confidence in Ewa and Ulf and we hope and believe that it will be a fun and groovy museum to visit.”

The museum will display the quartet’s satin costumes, long derided but which are nevertheless coming back into fashion. Madonna, whose recent hit Hung Up sampled Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man after Midnight), was seen in the song’s video wearing a distinctly Abba-esque outfit.

Also on display will be handwritten song lyrics, gold records and instruments that the band played on stage.

But much of the museum will be given over to the accumulated trivia that has kept the fan community together since the group last performed in 1982.

The founders say that the trick of the museum will be to transform the fan paraphernalia into something that interweaves with the history of the world.

For example, Abba was hot in communist Poland in 1976, when the country’s entire state budget for western music was earmarked for the group. But in 1982, after martial law was declared in Warsaw, Abba appeared in a US-backed concert critical of the Communist generals and its records were promptly banned from state radio stations. Seven years later communism collapsed.

The museum will be funded by private sponsorship and it seems certain that the financiers will make a handsome return on their investment. Abba, as usual, were there first with their song: “Money, money, money/Must be funny/In the rich man’s world.”

Mamma Mia!

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