Thanks to streaming, the music industry is “healthy” in Portugal and in the world: “Today, people don’t own the music.
For this Monday, a few days after the publication of a public report, a place on cultural studies in Portugal was scheduled for the presentation, in Bragança, of Feirapano-Lusa of the Music Industry month in Zamora, Spain. On the occasion, Expresso spoke with João Teixeira, director general of Warner Music, about the state of the Portuguese music industry.
Starting with the artists that marked the year of Warner, he mentioned Ed Sheeran, Coldplay and Bruno Mars. “When these artists decide to release music, they dominate right away,” he said. “In Portugal it was also resolved, towards the end of the year. two successes. One with a new artist we’re developing called Maninho. And another with a duet between Bárbara Bandeira and Carminho”.
More generally, some level stuff. “Until part of the year, the consumption of national music, which had focused on urban artists – hip hop and rap music, which we don’t have much – dropped a bit. I don’t know if it was because the schools were closed. These artists live a lot from going to schools and it will go viral. In 2021 not doing this circuit as much,” he explained.
Artists today much of what is normally sold in our country, or at least of what is a product of the product in the representations of streaming. “They are consumers for kids”, says Teixeira. “Kids, as you know, consume avidly. In addition to having the time, they are able to listen to a track twenty times a day, whenever they like. An adult does not have this behavior. The result is that these artists are easily at the top of the most streamed“.
Warner has some foreign artists in it, but not Portuguese, with the exception of DreNaz. And there are reasons that are easy to understand.” Most of these artists are independent. They make music at home, and the publishers then limit themselves to distributing it, putting the music in the alternatives. Warner has only recently started to develop this area, through a subsidiary”.
The streaming industry needs scale
Teixeira confirms that the field of music was seriously hit by the explosion of the Internet in the 90s and early 00s (with a drop that reached 80%), managed to recover. “It was the first major victim of the change in the technological ecosystem, with the deformation of the supports. But it was also the first industry to adapt to new times. Before the media, newspapers, which are still looking for ways to compensate for the loss of physical format sales; and video, which with platforms is getting around”.
How streaming and as platforms ad revenue, like YouTube, music piracy lost. “The work and videos from our computers, a simple way to guarantee the quality and risk of security, safety and security”. Even tools like DRM (digital rights management), which prevented piracy through Softwareimportance.
“The industry today is healthy”, concludes Teixeira. “Nowadays people don’t own the music. They just rent them to listen.”
This here, there are still global problems. “For an artist, the streaming is only of interest from the moment when there is a very important scale of consumption. For international artists, who sell all over the world, this is a given, but for the years it is already more complicated. We have a small, enveloped, poor country. A lot of people still don’t subscribe to a music platform, Listen to it, but on free services. So the revenues are not big yet.”
The investment in recording, in a video, in a marketing campaign is often not compensated by sales, he says. “But all this allows the artist to have what he has already tried hard to do in the past, at the time of the CD, it was the most important thing for him: the concerts, the career. That’s what national artists live on. And the industry, to compensate for the investment, receives a small percentage of the concerts they give. This is already institutionalized, it is a market practice. Nowadays, the release of an album is a marketing investment to be able to do concerts”.