Wired Magazine's cover story: FREE, by Chris Anderson, explores how the pricing of products from every digital business are headed towards $0.00. Somewhere in the middle of the story Chris mentions street vendors in Sao Paulo, Brazil who are selling "tecnobrega" CDs that, like most CDs sold on the street, did not come from a label.
Instead, they come directly from new bands, with names like Banda Calypso, who distribute masters of its CDs and CD liner art to street vendor networks in towns it plans to tour, with full agreement that the vendors will copy the CDs, sell them, and keep all the money. It turns out that this is OK for the band because the super-cheap CDs act as great promotion and regularly help to sell out shows of 5,000 people or more.
But Tecno Brega as a music movement did not start in Sao Paulo. It's birth actually happened in the unlikely city of Belem in the North of Brazil. Tecno Brega means 'cheesy beats' and the music involves some very creative sampling from mostly 80's pop tunes. Several hundred new Tecno Brega records are produced and released every year by local artists, with both the production and distribution taking place outside of the mainstream music industry.
In the documentary film 'Good Copy Bad Copy', Renaldo Lemos -- who is Director of the Center for Technology & Society and also the Project Lead for Creative Commons, Brazil, explains the model:
"In the North of Brazil, you have the Techno Brega movement. You have a music producer who has a recording studio. Probably a small one with good equipment. They invite the artists to these studios to make the CDs. They deliver it to the street vendors, so that they can replicate them. The only people making a profit out of CD sales are the street vendors. The musicians don't expect any money from releasing the CDs."
Renaldo continues: "The 'aparelhagem' or the sound system, is an important element in Techno Brega culture. The different sound systems complete against each other, about who has the most cutting-edge updated equipment. They already realize that CDs are not a good business model. CDs are merely an advertisement. They organize parties in weekends where you have 5000 people coming. Then you make money."
The tecno brega model is simple: the music lies outside the realm of traditional copyright and is used as a method of marketing events. Every weekend “sound system” parties attract thousands of people to the outskirts of Belem to listen to the Tecno Brega music. The parties are advertised by the distribution of the music itself. The numbers are incomplete, but the Belem scene alone brings in yearly revenues of several million US dollars.
Chris Anderson notes: "free is not quite as simple — or as stupid — as it sounds. Just because products are free doesn't mean that someone, somewhere, isn't making huge gobs of money".
In order for this model to work the music has to reach out to everyone. So, the street vendors (who we would call "pirates") have the freedom to copy and sell
thousands of CDs in cheap prices and they become the good guys. In this ecosystem,
the sound system show producers are happy, the artists are happy, street vendors are happy
and super cheap CDs make everyone else happy. And copyright? It's been thrown out with the bath water...
Last year I was lucky enough to attend the PortoMusical conference in Recife, Brazil. Each day of the conference I would emerge onto the street in company with several music industry delegates and bump into street vendors who were hawking CDs. There was quite a bit of joking about what these vendor's might think if they knew who they were trying to sell their products to as we walked by. But it turns out the joke was on us... Here we flown in from North America and Western Europe to ostensibly help Brazilian musicians learn how to 'make it' in the music business. It now seems that they might well have hired one or two of these street vendors to teach us a trick or two.
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