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Over the Top: The New (and Bigger) Cultural Industry in Brazil
Paula Martini · Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) · Sep 28th, 2007 4:11 am · 65 votes · 12 comments
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Calypso performing live in a stadium |
by renard494 |
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The most popular artist in Brazil is not signed by a record label. The group, called Calypso, is responsible for the most popular music in all regions of the country. 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.
The research interviewed more than 2,000 people in all regions. They were asked what music they were listening to at that particular moment, and, quite surprisingly, results showed that the most popular artists were not the ones pushed by the big industry and traditional media: alongside Calypso, two other bands in the top 10 are not signed by any label, and distribute their records just like the number one band.
Those results reveal something that could be empirically seen in Brazil before, although there has been no data available to prove it: there is a new reality in the Brazilian (and possibly the global) culture industry. The fact that a band like Calypso, neither signed with a recording company , nor having had any airtime on TV or radio, is the most popular artist in the country means that a big change is occuring. “It just proves something that you see when you travel in Brazil”, says the anthropologist Hermano Vianna, probably the first person in the country to detect this new trend.
The research made the cover of the most important newspaper in the country (Folha de São Paulo) and launched debates on socially-based business models that are now flourishing in Brazil. There are new business models that follow a new logic, adapted to reality as it is. They're still about market economy, but a market that relies on new production means and new distribution channels, powered by a wider access to new technologies. In other words, it is the dissemination of the “open business” ideal throughout the peripheries: anyone can distribute the content freely (the street vendors included) but you make money by reinventing your revenue sources. Copyright’s role becomes basically irrelevant in this new model.
On the fringes: the periphery becomes the center
Calypso does not use CDs as a source of revenues, but rather as marketing pieces. The little profit (each copy is sold for about US$1.50) is in most cases kept by the street vendors, responsible for distributing the albums countrywide. The copies do not need to be authorized before they are sold – again, copyright is not the engine of this model. Due to low pricing, the band's CDs are massively sold in Northern Brazil, pushing forward the band's success. Nowadays, one concert by Calypso is capable of attracting around 20,000 people in any city in Brazil. The band keeps an intense agenda. Their music is popular both in the rich Southeast of Brazil, as well as other poorer regions. If they sold CDs in the traditional manner for US$ 15 their popularity would not be so probable (and the profits could risk being kept mostly in the hands of the recording labels).
The band also makes money by selling CDs and DVDs of their live performances at their concerts. More recently, Calypso has been able to strike deals with supermarket chains to sell whole packages of their CDs directly, without any intermediation. For adopters of those new business models, value is not in the media anymore, but in the relationship between artist and audience. Value becomes “present value”, and they move out from an economy of “reproduction” to an economy of “production”, keeping up with what their fans want and making it easy for them to get it.
The use of technologies transforming cultural production
It took Calypso a few good years of work to get to be famous even in its own Northern region. Only when its popularity became incontrovertible and grew in national appeal – a completely independent goal – was it that the band, formed by the couple Joelma and Chimbinha started being nationally broadcast on TV.
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. He basically covered both ends of the Brazilian social pyramid through persistence. Chimbinha is a different kind of “self-made” artist. He made it big without the support of any recording company, television, radio or praising reviews.
But triumph doesn't work as a shelter against criticism. It is easy to see people saying that they occupy a place that they do not deserve; that it should be occupied by musicians with "qualified" backgrounds. Some critics that formerly blamed the “media” for spreading “popularesque” music, now blame the educational system. If the Brazilian population was better educated, they say, people would prefer to listen to more “high-quality” music, such as samba, ignoring the fact that samba was considered “poor quality music” in its beginnings, until it eventually became the symbol of the national cultural identity.
Long-live Calypso.
* For more information on the emergence of culture industries not driven by intellectual property incentives, one can find online on iCommons website the paper From Legal Commons to Social Commons: Brazil and the Cultural Industry, wrote by Professor Ronaldo Lemos for the Centre for Brazilian Studies at Oxford University.
** This article contains translated excerpts from Isso é Calypso, ou A Lua Não Me Traiu ("This is Calypso"), article by Hermano Vianna, CC BY-NC-SA 2.5, and from Uma Outra Economia Está Nascendo? ("Is a New Economy Being Born?"), by Lino Bocchini, CC BY 2.5.
tags: rio-de-janeiro brazil culture brazil music calypso phonographic-industry brega rock brazilian-culture belem para local-contexts-global-commons
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