In Brazil success lies on the street
At the panel discussion “fair music – it`s time for a change” that had been held on 20th September at net.culture.space in the Wiener Museumsquartier in Vienna (Austria), the brazilian musician Celia Mara, who lives in Austria, talked about her difficulties in getting into the music biz in Brazil and in Austria. In Brazil, if you want to get on the radio, you have to pay something like a bribe. In Austria it is difficult for her to get into mainstream media as her music does not fit into any typical music category.
How the music “industry” beyond the nationwide-radio-record-label-business in Brazil works and how musicians can make their own deals is now described in detail in an article on the iCommons website. Paula Martini from Rio de Janeiro there describes the success story of the most popular band, Calypso, that has no contract with a label but ows her success to street credibility. Martini writes: “Their albums are sold primarily through street vendors, who sell CDs and DVDs of the band in the streets, not because they are pirated, but because that is the preference of the group itself. This is the result of a recent research published by F/Nazca Saatchi & Saatchi, one of the largest advertising agencies in the country.”
Calypso does not use CDs as a source of revenues, but rather as marketing pieces for their concerts that attract around 20,000 people in any city in Brazil.
Paula Martini in her article: “Chimbinha, Calypso’s guitarist and band founder who used to work in a fish market, invested all the money he earned as a studio musician in the maintenance of his group in its first years, when they were not hired for any concerts. He used to ask every “lamp post radio” – stations whose speakers are spread over lamp posts in Belém streets – to play his songs. It was through one of those speakers that Calypso was listened to by a local agent, who invited the band for a tour in the south of the state of Pará. It was the first step: success took place little by little, at the cost of many months of daily performances, almost for free.
Ten years later, Calypso is now one of the few music acts in Brazil that owns its own jet plane – and Chimbinha’s hometown doesn’t even have a landing strip.”
read full article here: Over the Top: The New (and Bigger) Cultural Industry in Brazil
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