The year 2022 was a milestone for the music industry in Brazil. In April, the pop singer Anitta reached the number one position in the Billboard Global parade, placing herself as one of a selected list of international music stars from Brazil, amongst names such as Carmen Miranda, Antonio Carlos ‘Tom’ Jobim and Sergio Mendes. At the end of that year, the Brazilian record market was ranked the ninth most profitable in the world, earning $489 million (IFPI 2023; Pro-Música Brasil 2023). The figures display a beautiful picture: a successful case of a music industry undergoing digitisation. It does not indicate, however, how the Brazilian music industry managed to overcome the difficulties of the digitisation of music distribution, or even mention how the industry plans to deal with the challenges that lie ahead.
The digitisation of the music industry in Brazil implied a drastic change of business model worsened by the specificities of the domestic music market. Unlike in the developed economies, where the creative destruction of their respective music industries was somewhat offset by with the popularisation of several peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing systems, the traditional record companies operating in Brazil had to deal with a high level of compact disc (CD) and digital versatile disc (DVD) piracy. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, it was estimated that the pirate record music industry corresponded to more than 30 per cent of the record market. In some parts of the country, the pirate industry was the prevalent form of music distribution to the point that even formal content producers used its distribution structure to commercialise their music, giving up their copyright in order to reach a wider audience (the goal was to attract people to live concerts) (Lemos and Castro 2008).
When the internet became the main method to access digital music by the mid-2000s, record companies observed a social movement emerging from the music community, claiming to be coming up with a new business model that could directly connect content producers to consumers. As record sales were sharply declining, independent musicians decided not to sign contracts with music labels but to manage their own careers instead. These autonomous artists financed the recording of their own music, distributed it for free through the internet using Creative Commons licences, hoping their fans could produce network effects by themselves (De Marchi 2016).
At the same time, local entrepreneurs tried to build a digital music distribution system that could serve as an official alternative to the P2P software. Experimenting with new business models, start-ups such as iMusica, Trevo Digital and FunStation managed to present technical solutions to distribute digital music through websites. Nevertheless, they faced different difficulties and found themselves in a contradictory situation. On the one hand, they never really convinced major record companies to support their systems, as these players were not confident that these systems could be easily scaled. On the other, autonomous musicians were engaged in their own business model, distributing their music for free over the internet.
The combination of a high level of piracy, the use of P2P systems and a reluctant attitude among market players resulted in a sharp decrease in record sales (about 70 per cent of units sold) and the timid performance of the digital music market: up to 2015, the digital segment represented no more than 20 per cent of total record industry revenue (De Marchi 2016, 2023).
It was only in the 2010s that international services started to operate in the country. In December 2011, Apple's iTunes Store was launched, and YouTube opened an office in Brazil. Despite being residual amongst music consumers, the mere presence of Apple attracted several other companies, from digital distributors (e.g. The Orchard, Believe Digital, Altafonte, CD Baby) to streaming services (e.g. Deezer, Rdio, Napster). As these companies gained ground amongst Brazilian content producers and music consumers, the domestic start-ups went out of business. Even autonomous artists began to hire digital distributors to reach both digital record stores and streaming services. In 2014, Spotify started its operations in the country, consolidating streaming as the main means of distributing digital music. It was no coincidence that in 2015, for the first time, streaming services were responsible for most of the music industry's revenue (61 per cent) – in 2022, the streaming services alone accounted for 86.2 per cent of the entire industry's revenue (Pro-Música Brasil 2023).
The remarkable performance of companies like Spotify, Deezer, Apple Music and YouTube Music amongst consumers reveals that the Brazilian music industry is now a part of the celestial jukebox1 (Burkart and McCourt 2006), a metaphor used amongst entertainment managers to refer to an ideal virtual platform that would distribute in a centralised way different kinds of digital content (photographs, news, music, audio-visual material). Now, the Brazilian music industry is part of a virtual and international system of digital content distribution, something that presents both opportunities and challenges. Issues such as the value gap or the intensive use of AI for the distribution (and even production) of music have become a source of constant complaint amongst domestic content producers, and concerns related to access to domestic content are also emerging amongst cultural activists. The question that arises from this scenario is: what will happen to the Brazilian music industry?
In order to assess this question, this article discusses, on the one hand, the digitisation of the Brazilian music industry, underlining the specificities of this process. On the other, it discusses how the consolidation of the digital music market conducted by international digital platforms has affected the Brazilian music industry. In the conclusion, it underlines key issues that will arise in the music industry in Brazil in the near future.
Notes on methodology
This article incorporates material from my previous research on the Brazilian music industry (De Marchi 2015, 2016, 2023). The music industry was taken as a case study for a broad analysis of the creative economy in developing economies in the twenty-first century. My intention was not only to understand the causes and characteristics of the current economic change (how innovation affected the market structure and whether digital platforms made the music market more ‘efficient’ in comparison to P2P systems, for instance), but also to assess how it affected access to public goods (how the digitisation of phonogram distribution affected access to cultural heritage and whether it facilitated or impeded the access of Brazilian content producers to the digital market). In other words, echoing Peter Golding and Graham Murdock (1991: 18–19), my interest ‘goes beyond technical issues of efficiency to engage with basic moral questions of justice, equity and the public good’ – in this case, stressing the new conditions for the domestic content producers and their access to cultural heritage.
Following the approach of the political economy of communication (Bolaño 2008; Mosco 2009) and critical platform studies (Srnicek 2010; Zuboff 2018), I have tried to understand the changes in the market structure, the changes in the legislation that controls the commerce of recorded music, and the consequences of these changes for both music producers and consumers. I conducted interviews with record companies’ managers and staff as well as with entrepreneurs that ran start-ups. I also compiled data published by the institutions dedicated to the music industry both in Brazil (the former Associação Brasileira de Produtores de Discos [Brazilian Record Producers Association, ABPD], now rebranded Pro-Música Brasil) and abroad (the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry), analysed copyright law and cultural policies, and followed some cases such as the situations regarding domestic start-ups and autonomous artists.
The creative destruction and the crisis of the physical media
Globally, digitisation followed what could be regarded as the 1990s golden age of the record industry. As the changes that followed were extreme, the economy of the record industry melted down and began a period of experiences with new digital sound formats and business models. In developed economies, the beginning of the twenty-first century was marked by innovation in the distribution of digital phonograms. It was facilitated by new technologies such as mp3 files, digital players (e.g. Winamp) and P2P file-sharing platforms). These formats dismantled the analogue distribution of physical records, sparking a digital music war (Burkart and McCourt 2006; Witt 2015).
In Brazil, however, the creative destruction of the record industry did not follow the same script. As the access to the internet was restricted mostly to the upper classes until the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, the transformation of the record market began with piracy. During the 1990s, major record companies decided to rapidly digitise music consumption, imposing the CD as the only format available for listeners (Prestes Filho 2005). By fiat, these companies decided to diminish the production of vinyl and magnetic tapes, leaving the digital disc as the only possibility to buy music. In so doing, record companies could charge the standard international price for each disc ($15) (Vicente 2014), which resulted in a remarkable growth for major record companies: between 1990 and 1999, there was an increase of 114.38 per cent in revenues and 46.6 per cent in unit sales (De Marchi 2016; Dias 2000), as shown in Figure 1.
Record Sales in Brazil, 1990–1999
Citation: Journal of Legal Anthropology 7, 2; 10.3167/jla.2023.070205
In 1996, Brazil became the most profitable record market in Latin America and the sixth in the world, according to IFPI (De Marchi 2016). However, that ranking forced a radical reorganisation of the informal industry as well. In the 1970s, pirated music commerce was based on the sale of recorded cassette tapes produced and exported from Paraguay (Prestes Filho 2005). The change from magnetic tapes to digital discs demanded another productive structure. The production of pirated CDs and DVDs was transferred to Asia, and the distribution started to be done through the Brazilian ports. As record companies insisted on keeping the album as the only format for the CD, consumers came to consider official products too expensive and inefficient. After all, a person had to pay $15 for a disc containing 12 songs just to hear one or two songs that played on the radio (Castro 2007). Gradually, a growing number of consumers turned to pirated products sold by street vendors for less than $2. By the late 1990s, the piracy industry became an important source of access to music in the CD era2 (Castro and Mizukami 2013; Karaganis 2011).
When P2P file-sharing became available, it was through piracy distribution that most Brazilians had access to mp3 files. In the report for the year 2007, the former ABPD (2008) claimed that, only in that year, 36 million pirated CDs and DVDs were seized by the police. There were also actions against pirated music over the internet: more than 55,000 links to movie and music files were removed from the internet and 15,000 files were removed from P2P file-sharing programmes. The report also noted that, despite consumers starting to use the internet to access digital music, there was an increase in the sale of pirated CDs. The situation was not contradictory: in fact, pirates were downloading music files through P2P platforms, burning CDs on their own PCs, and passing the discs on to street vendors to sell to consumers.
The combination of piracy and the distribution of digital music through P2P systems provoked a significant drop in physical disc sales. Between 1999 and 2009, there was a 70.8 per cent reduction in units sold (equivalent to 61.2 per cent in terms of revenue). CD sales alone dropped 78.1 per cent in the same period (De Marchi 2016), as can be seen in Figure 2.
Record market in Brazil, 1999–2009
Citation: Journal of Legal Anthropology 7, 2; 10.3167/jla.2023.070205
By the end of that decade, the record industry was lost in translation. Key market players did not know how to act in the face of the digitisation of music distribution. They could only react against incomers (P2P file-sharing systems) and called for ever harder punishment against everything they would recognise as ‘piracy’ – including entrepreneurs that would offer solutions to digital music distribution. In addition, the copyright lobby did not accept any claims to a more flexible copyright law. For many jurists, the Brazilian copyright law (Act No. 9.610/1998) was deemed inadequate for the digital era. Inspired by a maximalist view of the concept of copyright, the text ignored the existence of the digital environment on the horizon. For critical commentators, it was a piece of legislation whose spirit was much more focussed on maintaining the status quo, a situation that had already been consolidated in the previous decades than it was on creating a legal framework that would prepare the culture industries for the digital age (Lemos 2005). For instance, there was no provision concerning the digital content industry; the word ‘internet’ was mentioned only once – and even so to declare that even the distribution of content ‘through the internet’ could be deemed ‘piracy’. It should be noted that 1998 is the same year that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act was promulgated in the United States.
The digitalisation of music distribution: The Schumpeterian adjustment, 2000–2015
As traditional market players were disoriented, two new types of entrepreneurs appeared on the scene. On the one hand, there were local start-ups that built the first digital music distribution systems, such as iMusica, Trevo Digital and Trama Virtual. Those companies opted for different business models: online stores, subscriptions to download music files, and even such different services as ring-back tones for cell phones. On the other, there was what I have labelled autonomous artists (De Marchi 2015). Not interested in signing a contract with any record company, the artists themselves became Individual Microentrepreneurs (MEI, a category in Brazilian labour law), which is what allowed them to legally operate as if they were a small enterprise. The artists paid the costs for recording their own songs and making them available for free on the internet, using Creative Commons licences.3 The goal was to produce a network effect organically, as the fans themselves became responsible for sharing files through P2P platforms. The justification behind this hybrid business model was that the massive sharing of their music would attract more and more fans to live concerts (the economic activity that more directly generated revenue for the artists). On the websites, fans could not only download records, but also to buy marketing products, such as t-shirts, bottoms and even CDs in deluxe editions, which also generated revenue for the enterprise. Bands like O Teatro Mágico, Móveis Coloniais de Acajú and Forfun achieved prominence on the music scene by applying this strategy.
Another alternative experience mixed the productive structures of the legal music industry and the piracy distribution system. Noticing the socio-economic profile of their audience, some music producers and independent artists understood that the CDs and DVDs were the main music media for their audience. In order to reach a massive audience as fast as possible, bypassing official radio stations that practised the ‘payola’,4 these producers and artists began to record their music in their own home studios, delivering the master recordings to pirate producers. These agents burnt CDs and DVDs in large scale and delivered them to street vendors. The gross revenue obtained through the selling of pirated discs for a lower cost remained entirely with the street vendors and the pirates’ intermediaries. The copyright owners never received money for their content.
The goal was to attract fans to live concerts. The key point here was that these concerts were controlled by the record producers themselves (see Lemos and Castro 2005). Unlike the average autonomous artist, who only recorded his or her music and distributed the resulting phonogram for free hoping that his or her fans would attend the concerts spontaneously, the music producers that co-operated with the pirate industry controlled the Aparelhagens, the sound systems crews that produced large parties and live concerts. Thus, they profited not only from with the ticket sales but also from food and drink sales during the events. Music genres of great popular appeal such as tecnobrega or funk carioca (Brazilian funk) made intensive use of this strategy (Lemos and Castro 2005).
These experiences indeed created a digital music ecosystem that met the characteristics of the Brazilian music market at that specific moment. From the P2P file-sharing system to the open business model practised on the tecnobrega music scene, Brazilian music consumers were having access to digital music even at the height of the crisis of CD sales. The point was that this distribution system was functioning beyond the control of the official music industry and the main communication companies. As a result, a search for an ‘official’ solution began.
The efforts conducted by the domestic start-ups was not doing well, however. The sale of digital files in online stores was insignificant at best. Before the smartphone and its app ecosystem, it was necessary to attract consumers to a specific website where the person should pay for one or a few files to download. It was not attractive compared to the possibility of downloading countless files from P2P systems or even of buying a CD with hundreds of songs already downloaded at the street vendor's kiosk. Moreover, on several occasions there was a clash of interests: often, digital music stores offered the catalogue of autonomous artists, but the same songs were available for free on the latter's official websites. The artists did not perceive advantages in selling their songs in the digital stores compared to their free distribution. Logically, this competition prevented the digital stores from gaining scale and, as a result, from attracting more consumers to their own networks.
Another significant hurdle was the lack of legal protection. Unlike in the United States, where the DMCA created the conditions for the development of digital platforms, in Brazil the government did not have any legal instruments that could foster local start-ups. As mentioned above, the copyright law did not present any provision crafted to protect the digital distribution of cultural goods. As a result, innovation was not legally protected, making incumbents see the digital market as the locus for piracy, not for investment.5
As time passed, the distribution of digital music turned out to be economically unsustainable (De Marchi 2016). Left to market forces alone, digital stores could not gain scale and autonomous artists could not manage to surpass a certain threshold, as their distribution was limited to those who were already fans. Furthermore, traditional record companies were reluctant to invest in the digital market. The result was that the digital segment was a minor part of the overall music market: up to mid-2010, it never surpassed 30 per cent of the gross revenue of the music market, being unable to compensate for the free fall in disc revenues (De Marchi 2023).
In hindsight, it can be said that an opportunity to consolidate a digital music market based on a local arrangement was lost. There was a chance to build a distribution system that could meet the characteristics and demands of local music producers and consumers, even presenting a legal framework that could boost the domestic music industry and establish a productive partnership with the information technology industry. As it was not the case, the Brazilian music market remained in crisis. The solution could only come, so it seemed, from abroad.
The platformisation of the music industry
Two events marked a turning point in the digital music market: the agreements between YouTube and the Escritório Central de Arrecadação e Distribuição de direitos autorais (ECAD), and between Apple and the collecting society União Brasileira de Editoras de Música (UBEM) for the iTunes Store.
Although it had been accessible to Brazilian users since 2007, it was only in 2010 that YouTube entered into an agreement with ECAD. As detailed by Pedro Francisco and Mariana Valente (2015), ECAD agreed with YouTube that the company should reserve 2.5 per cent of its revenue to pay for public performance rights, committing to pay a minimum amount of $150,000 to copyright holders. It was also established that royalties should be paid to copyright holders every six months.
In 2011, Apple made an agreement for its iTunes Store with UBEM. This agreement was more complicated, as it resulted from a strategic move made by major music publishers and record companies. The usual requirement of the American corporation to start the activities of its previous online music store was to pay the royalties to a single collecting entity which would be responsible for the distribution of the money (a method known, in the jargon of the market, as one-stop-shop). In most countries, this agreement was facilitated by the fact that there is just one collecting society per country (like SGAE in Spain, SACEM in France or GEMA in Germany). But it is not the case in Brazil. Throughout the twentieth century, many copyright collection entities emerged in Brazil, competing for membership. This caused many difficulties in collecting and distributing royalties to copyright holders. In a new copyright law, in 1974, the Brazilian government decided to create a central copyright collection office that would replace all other entities, ECAD. However, using their influence over policymakers, the collecting entities managed to change the letter of the law: instead of being extinguished, they would become part of the management committee of ECAD itself. In this hybrid model, the number of memberships influences the balance of power inside ECAD. To solve the problem, major music publishers created UBEM in 2010. Some people familiar with the subject argue that the creation of the new society was part of an effort to attract Apple and other streaming services to Brazil. From the outset, UBEM became a powerful player in the music market not only because it managed the most valuable catalogues but also because it hired the services of the Argentinean company BackOffice to manage the metadata produced by the iTunes Store in the process of paying copyright holders.6
Although these agreements did not solve the legal uncertainty inherent in the new business model, they created confidence amongst market players to adhere to the digital music market. Amongst content producers and copyright owners, it was perceived that international corporations such as Apple and Google had the funds to pay the copyright royalties in advance, unlike the domestic start-ups. Besides, these companies promised access to a global market: once uploaded, under a standard contract, one file could reach the international market immediately. What is more, by that time, Brazilian consumers started to have access to smartphones, and the app interface facilitated their access to music services, dispensing with the effort to go to a website to buy a file and download it. Access became instantaneous.
As soon as YouTube and iTunes started to operate, digital distributors also entered the Brazilian market, notably The Orchid (United States) and Believe Digital (United Kingdom). Streaming services followed suit. First, emerging platforms such as Deezer, Rdio and a renewed Napster started to offer their services to Brazilians. In addition, they established partnerships with mobile phone operators, gaining access to millions of users indirectly. In 2014, Spotify entered the market, boosting the overall adherence of the population to streaming services. In 2022, this sort of company represented 86.2 per cent of the phonographic industry's total revenue (Pro-Música Brasil 2023).
It was no coincidence that local online music services were discontinued as competition with international players began. The impact was first felt by the music stores, as in the case of iMusica and Trevo Digital. Both companies quit the market as soon as iTunes started to operate. Competition has since been extended to the mobile phone market. If in the 2000s the Brazilian start-up iMusica monopolised this profitable niche, in the following decade most cell phone operators hired international streaming services such as Rdio (Oi), Napster (Vivo) and Deezer (TIM). In 2014, the mobile operator Claro S.A. (a holding of the Mexican America Móvil) bought iMusica from the Brazilian holding company IdeaisNet S.A., transforming it into its own music service, Claro Música.
At the same time, autonomous musicians perceived the streaming services as a way of reaching a wider audience and to monetise their phonograms. As a result, these small producers began to adhere to digital distributors, especially Brazilian ones that dealt with artists alone, such as Tratore Music Distributor and One RPM. As a condition to access the new digital platforms, they had to abandon the business model they developed over the last decade. In some music scenes, however, the practice of distributing music using informal methods was not completely abandoned. On the contrary, in some cases content producers still depended on the informal distribution of music in order to produce at least a first-level of network effect amongst their audience. This practice is not unusual; for instance, one finds it in the sertanejo (Brazilian country music) or the Brazilian funk music scenes.
What was slightly different is that either YouTube or SoundCloud became the main channel for free music, each working as a surrogate platform to the P2P system. Despite a few Brazilian streaming services that kept running, like the web radio service SuperPlayer and the streaming service Sua Música, the Brazilian music market was reorganised around the global streaming services and digital distributors, as can be seen in Figure 3 below. Sua Música's streaming service is an interesting case study, in as much as it reveals the logic behind the reorganisation of the Brazilian record industry. The platform is totally dedicated to music genres produced in the north and north-east states of Brazil – less-developed parts of the country in economic terms – such as forró, brega and their derivatives. Those music genres were historically disregarded by major record companies, which were located in the south-eastern part of the country, and, as a result, also by the international music streaming services. Seizing the opportunity, the entrepreneurs that created Sua Música developed a digital platform that distributed this sort of music, which was marginal to the mainstream music market.
Segment performance (annual revenue) 2003–2021 (millions of Brazilian reals).
Citation: Journal of Legal Anthropology 7, 2; 10.3167/jla.2023.070205
In recent years, the Associação Brasileira de Música Independente (ABMI), an association that represents the independent record companies, also started to produce its own market report. This effort broadened the scope of the analysis to an important group of small and medium-sized record companies and digital distributors as well. Through its reports, it is known that in 2020 independent companies earned around R$190 million, and that 45.74 per cent of the artists streamed on Spotify Brazil came from independent labels (ABMI 2022).
When the former Associação Brasileira de Produtores de Discos (since 2016, renamed Pro-Música Brasil) started to account for the digital segment, in 2006, the revenue of the digital segment represented between 3 per cent and 25 per cent, at best, of the industry's total revenue. From 2011 onwards, however, there was a turnaround: in 2017, the music industry earned $295.8 million, with the digital sector (downloads, mobile and streaming) representing 60 per cent of total revenue. In 2021, the digital segment accounted for 86 per cent of the $391 million in total revenue – streaming alone accounted for 85.6 per cent (Pro-Música Brasil 2023). In 2022, Brazil occupied the ninth position in the IFPI rankings, being one of the main drivers of the 31.2 per cent growth in the Latin American region in 2021 (IFPI 2023).
These numbers indicate that the record industry in Brazil is now part of a virtual and global system of music distribution, what can be labelled as the celestial jukebox (Burkart and McCourt 2006). The decisions of content producers on how to operate, how to access consumers, amongst other functional strategic decisions, are now dependent on a modus operandi built abroad without taking into consideration the specificities of the Brazilian music market (De Marchi 2023). This situation brings benefits as well as risks to the domestic industry and to cultural diversity.
Conclusion
If the official figures indicate that the music industry in Brazil has resumed its path of growth in the digital era, they do not reveal the challenges that lie ahead. The music industry in Brazil is now organised around international streaming services, with little participation from domestic players. In addition, there is no public policy that could both protect and foster the local industry.
This context presents both economic opportunities as well as challenges for the local music industry not only in the economic dimension but also in the cultural dimension. On the one hand, the international digital platforms indeed consolidated a certain business model that managed to stabilise the digital music market. Any musician can display his or her music whether on Spotify, YouTube or Apple Music using digital distributors. On the other, streaming services not only pay inconsistent and derisory amounts of money to copyright holders (the value gap imbroglio), but they also do not pay neighbouring rights to interpreters, creating great discontent amongst these professionals. As music-streaming services grow in popularity, it becomes less interesting to radio stations to broadcast music content, worsening the economic situation for those musicians who depend on broadcasting to earn copyright royalties.7
In fact, there is no alternative outlet to streaming services. To reach the market means to attend to the demands of the international players. This situation poses a threat on both an economic and cultural level. In 2023, facing an imminent new copyright law that would oblige the streaming services to pay higher copyright royalties in Uruguay, a country neighbouring Brazil, Spotify announced that it would leave the country. The threat was a reminder to all local governments of the power that streaming services have over the music industry and of its unwillingness to negotiate better conditions for digital content producers. In Brazil, the legislative branch is also debating a similar bill on streaming services. If turned into an Act, what would be Spotify's reaction to the Brazilian government?
These questions are not minor issues. Entire music scenes are dependent on digital platforms, as in the case of the Brazilian funk that uploads a countless number of videos to YouTube every day. If this platform decides to discontinue its services in the country, how will that music scene survive in the short term? Who will protect these content producers?
The risk of the disarticulation of the local music industry is not an exaggeration. The audio-visual industry in Brazil already faces difficulties concerning the modus operandi of video-streaming services. In the absence of cultural policies that force streaming services to invest systematically in the local audio-visual industry, Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney and the like choose a restricted number of projects to produce for their catalogues, keeping the copyright of those works. Brazilian audio-visual producers thus see less possibilities to distribute their material in the digital market, which results in an important loss of financial return. As a result, the number of audio-visual companies is decreasing in Brazil. Surely, the music industry has a different productive structure. Notwithstanding this situation, the problems concerning copyright royalties are stressing the local music economy, and there is no protection against the oligopoly that the streaming services have created.
In sum, the economic sustainability of the digital music industry and the protection of cultural diversity cannot be taken for granted in the current scenario. The Brazilian music industry has now reached a point that demands a new legal framework and alternatives to the international streaming services.
Notes
Patrick Burkart and Tom McCourt (2006) use the expression to refer to a project of media corporations to build a centralised system for digital content distribution that works virtually and around the world. It is in this sense that the term is used in this article.
The pirate producers not only sold illegal copies of offical albums, but they also produced compilations containing hit songs of the moment. When P2P file-sharing systems became available, these compilations could gather more than a hundred songs, being organised in the way playlists would be organised later on in the streaming services.
The Creative Commons project was brought to Brazil in the early 2000s by the lawyer Ronaldo Lemos and colleagues associated at the time with the Centro de Tecnologia e Sociedade of Fundação Getúlio Vargas, an important law school in the city of Rio de Janeiro.
In the music industry, the term ‘payola’ (a portmanteau for the expression ‘pay to play’) is used to label the practice of charging for playing an artist on the airwaves. In Brazil, the payola was never considered a crime. As a result, it was largely practised amongst key radio stations and television channels.
At that time, there was an effort to change the copyright law No. 9.610/98 in order to foment the emerging digital market. During his tenure as the Minister of Culture, between 2003 and 2008, the musician and politician Gilberto Gil advocated in favour of a new copyright law suited to the demands of the digital age. However, his efforts collided with the lobby of incumbent copyright holders, who were reluctant to make any changes to the copyright law text. The battle would be won by the lobby: neither Gilberto Gil nor the following ministers have had enough political capital to issue a new copyright law or even to propose an amendment to the original text.
The collective entities thus kept competing for memberships to control the central bureau and being influential over the music market. By bringing together the music publishers of the major record companies, UBEM immediately became one of the most powerful entities in the music market to the point of attracting a giant like Apple.
This is not a minor problem for the music economy. In many parts of Brazil, audiences have difficulty getting access to broadband internet. Thus, music services such as YouTube and Spotify are not the main options for many music consumers: it is radio. For certain music genres, the diminishing space music content finds on airwaves is a hurdle to producing network effects that can be reverted whether in copyright royalties or in concert attendance.
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