A good article in Valor about music and the Internet. Since access to the newspaper’s archive is restricted, once again I will perform a public service by reproducing Cadão Volpato’s interviews and reflections here. To access the original article, with all the published images, click here.
The new sounds of broadband
By Cadão Volpato, for Valor, from São Paulo
December 26, 2008
Publicity photo
The Brasília band Nancy, which played in São Paulo last month as one of the winners of HttpSom, a competition developed almost entirely on the MySpace platform
Information, entertainment, consumption, work, communication, sociability: all of this fits into a single package for anyone who is young, would like to be, or pretends to be. All of it can be found on the Internet. And of all the fields hit by the virtual hurricane, music seems to circulate most readily what people experience online. “There is already a web generation,” says artist Giselle Beiguelman, a graduate professor of Communication and Semiotics at the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo (PUC-SP). “But it is not a phenomenon exclusive to music. It recurs in photography and video and, as technologies advance, bandwidth expands and equipment becomes cheaper, it promises to radically alter how film and television circulate.”
In music, however, everything changes at enormous speed. “I think this is more evident in the music industry because music is very important in young people’s lives, and they have plenty of time to listen to it, talk about it and write about it,” observes João Paulo Gomes of the Brasília band Nancy, which played in São Paulo last month as one of the winners of HttpSom, a competition developed almost entirely on MySpace — almost entirely because the musicians selected on the site stepped out of the virtual world to perform live in the city.
The major record labels are witnessing gigantic, ongoing changes to their business model. Once masters of the scene, they now try to shift their heavy bodies and extend their tentacles in every direction to see what they can catch. “The industry’s world was untouchable,” says music producer Carlos Eduardo Miranda, one of the creators of Trama Virtual, who had been puzzling over the online business since the end of the last century. “In 2002, we started in an experimental phase. I invited friends to test the software,” Miranda recalls. “And suddenly the thing exploded.” The group Cansei de Ser Sexy, now a worldwide sensation, emerged in those wilder days of the site. Internationally, the case of British band Arctic Monkeys also says a lot about what it meant to start from a small virtual outpost and reach huge audiences. Arctic Monkeys are no longer a novelty — not least because novelties are replaced at astonishing speed. But they still sell many records and play many shows.
With discoveries shared in an ever-expanding universe, the CD format is just another item in the artist’s toolkit. “Record labels are regrouping, because the impact on their business was enormous. Today they are working in other areas, such as concert promotion, and teaming up with artists’ managers,” says Haryston Oliveira, marketing director of MySpace Brazil. “I think the Internet helps enormously with promotion, much more than pressing a thousand copies of a record,” says Nancy’s Gomes. The labels, then, need to discover new roles. “Thanks to the virtual gods, we have freed ourselves from stupid market constraints that held back our growth and our progress in every direction and toward every audience,” says journalist and activist DJ Lucio Ribeiro. “Today it matters more when a little kid’s blog in Natal says what is good and worthwhile than when a misleading press release arrives ‘selling’ an act,” he adds.
For Flu, the musician from Rio Grande do Sul who was another HttpSom winner, the uprooting imposed on songwriters, performers and musicians by the Internet hurricane is “liberating.” “Everyone has to fend for themselves. Finding ways to live from art is the great enigma,” he says. “Artists need to use this freedom to create new situations, both in composition and in promotion.”
There is no shortage of new situations. A singer like Mallu Magalhães, a 16-year-old teenage phenomenon, leapt from MySpace into the media’s lap in a matter of months. It all began with a few posts featuring her tiny voice, attuned to Dylanesque folk. From there it reached Lucio Ribeiro’s attentive computer. Finally, through a chain reaction no industry behemoth managed to foresee, there was the girl on television — specifically on Serginho Groissman’s Altas Horas. Most interestingly, it all ended with a record — or CD — as in the old days, only with the process reversed. Today, alone or accompanied by her boyfriend Marcelo Camelo, formerly of Los Hermanos, Mallu draws screams and tears wherever she goes. And she moves through very different circles. “She is total media convergence,” Ribeiro philosophizes. “She is on MySpace and in Caras. On Ego! and in Mônica Bergamo’s column. She plays on indie radio and live at Na Mata Café.”
Speaking of Los Hermanos, the band’s other bearded member, Rodrigo Amarante, also used MySpace to promote his new work: a multinational partnership with Strokes drummer Fabrizio Moretti, Brazilian by blood and English-speaking, and Moretti’s American girlfriend, Binki Shapiro. The trio posted its likable, laid-back songs on the platform, mixing California beach culture with reggae and ska rhythms and recalling, in many ways, the two worlds in which they were created. Only afterward came the record, bearing the band’s name, Little Joy, just released on Rough Trade, a label with a somewhat independent reputation. From Denver, Colorado, to Portland, Oregon, they had shows scheduled right up to Christmas, just to round off the year.
Gomes and his band Nancy also had an international experience. The band had existed since college, but circumstances separated singer Camila and leader João Paulo Gomes. He moved to Rio; she went to London for a master’s degree. “We realized we wanted to keep making music together despite the distance, and naturally began exchanging little pieces of new compositions,” he says. He would record some guitar on his laptop and email it to Camila, who would reply with a vocal idea. When she announced that she would be spending some time in Brazil, he reassembled the band, turned the sketches into real songs and sent them back to Camila, who recorded the vocals at home. She arrived for the final recording sessions. Only then did she meet the other guitarist. But Gomes does not believe the method affected the kind of music they make. “Collective effort is always better,” the musician says.
Journalist Lucio Ribeiro cites other examples of working over the Internet. The first resembles Nancy’s story. Stephanie Toth, a 16-year-old girl from São Paulo — a much edgier, more indie Mallu Magalhães — met a guitarist from Minas Gerais online, sent him songs recorded on her computer with voice and acoustic guitar, and received them back enhanced with strings and extra sounds, all duly posted on MySpace.
“Until recently, she still hadn’t met the boy in person,” says Ribeiro. São Paulo band Los Pirata, with an established place in the city’s music scene, made a record by exchanging ideas and recordings over the Internet with a producer at a medium-sized studio in Washington. And finally, rapper Jay-Z, linked to the major industry and therefore recording in the most sophisticated way possible, also ended up posting everything on MySpace. “You may not get the best sound quality from the Internet, but a girl, a mid-sized band and a wealthy superstar are arriving at the same end of the process,” the critic concludes. Many others are catching up: Zezé Di Camargo & Luciano have just launched their MySpace profile, and singer Paula Toller is announcing the release of her new album on her page there.
It remains to be seen how far the productive confusion and variety of information unloaded through the web can help creation itself. In other words, to what extent does the Internet transform artists’ production, given that audiences seem thoroughly transformed?
“You should no longer create with idol worship and fortunes in mind,” says Flu, who experienced the recording industry and its golden days in the 1980s as guitarist for Rio Grande do Sul band DeFalla. “It has never been so easy to listen to music. It has never been so easy to make music. But everything is so scattered that you have to find the pockets where art has value. We need to ensure artists can survive.”
For Giselle Beiguelman, “it is the Internet that is completely changing the way we access cultural production as a whole. The great cultural shift is linked to social networks, of which MySpace is one example, and to sharing platforms such as BitTorrent, eMule and Kazaa, which ferment temporary nano-audiences.” This should affect production in a two-way process. “Despite the defense mounted by some more purist artists,” says MySpace’s Oliveira, “the album as a work has lost value. The current speed of consumption and variety of options have created a model in which individual tracks are the stars of consumption.” For nano-audiences, individual tracks.
“You don’t make anything for the masses,” veteran producer Miranda warns. “Artists now need to do what they believe in. They have to be even more devoted to music. Putting it online is not enough: they have to pursue it. There will always be someone who identifies with them,” he says. “The important thing is to produce and post,” Flu adds. “That is how circles of affinity form and exchanges of information begin. And this great mixture tends to be wonderful, both for listeners online and for artists.”
The fact is that new things appear every day — even if we consider only music promoted online. Anyone wanting to understand the state of music production worldwide will need to navigate endless possibilities like mad. The good thing is that, in this great jumble into which knowledge on the Internet has turned, there will always be an informal “curator,” someone willing, through a blog or news site, to take strangers by the hand and guide them through the branches. “It could be a New Yorker journalist you trust,” says Lucio Ribeiro. “Or the blog of that boy in Natal, or a 17-year-old in a classroom whom his classmates trust. The filter has opened wide.” He himself picks up new discoveries on his countless trips as a DJ into the country’s depths. On his blog and on his travels, he also plays the role of virtual “curator.”
What this web generation holds in its hands is no small thing. It is a world in constant transformation, but one that enables more democratic action, tailored to individual tastes. At least for now. As Miranda says, “The ‘I’m a genius, someone has to look after me’ era is over.” The future will bring still more striking changes, in forms of media convergence already knocking at our door, in the rather messy mixture of computers, mobile phones, news sites and blogs, all at once.
Everyone interviewed for this article, aged between 27 and 46, downloads music from the Internet as the most natural thing in the world. Some, like João Paulo Gomes, have not laid eyes on a CD in a long time. Others, like Flu, have not found much good music to download, but remain confident about the future. Still others, like MySpace’s Oliveira, keep finding new bands. He discovered three on his last online excursion before the interview — Breaking Benjamin, Godsmasck and The 69 Eyes — whom you have probably never heard of, but may hear next week.
The future has never been so close, so open or so musical.