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Thank you very much.
It’s a pleasure to be here at TED, and in Brazil.
I think this is a very important moment
that shows we’re living at a time
that is, to say the least, interesting, here in Brazil.
My presentation is divided into two parts.
For the first part, I d like to say that when Chris Anderson,
the editor for Wired magazine,
was in Brazil, about two years ago,
the only request he made was to meet with a lady from Belém do Pará,
her name was Gaby Amarantos, and she’s the singer with the band Tecno Show.
I think that’s a very interesting image:
Silicon Valley coming to Brazil to meet someone from the ghetto.
We, ourselves, often do not pay much attention to that.
And so I think it’should be asked
why that meeting was so important for Chris Anderson,
and what this meeting represents for what’s happening in Brazil today.
In order to answer that question,
we cannot neglect the LAN houses.
I guess everyone here knows them, everyone has been to a LAN house.
If you haven t, this is a LAN house.
This is also a LAN house.
And the important thing I must mention is this:
Brazil has 2,000 movie theaters,
Brazil has 2,600 bookstores scattered across the country,
it has about 5,000 public libraries,
and 90,000 LAN houses.
So, the LAN house has turned into a new kind of public space,
both real and virtual,
that is bringing connectivity to all of Brazil.
And it’s also worth noting, if you look at this graph
that shows how people access the internet in Brazil,
that 49% of unique access points come from LAN houses,
40% of these are from households,
and 6% are from government-funded initiatives, such as the telecenters.
The interesting thing about LAN houses is that they’re an entrepreneurial phenomenon
which overtook an entire country, from the bottom up.
Which took connectivity to places that we often could not have imagined.
If you take a walk at Rocinha, in Rio de Janeiro, there are over 150 LAN houses,
Cidade de Deus has 80, and so on.
This is important because it has brought connectivity to the country
and created a new public space.
This is part of a larger phenomenon, one that I’ve been calling
the appropriation of technology by the Brazilian ghettos .
And this appropriation of technology is taking place all over the country,
driven by all the places in all of Brazil.
For some time now, actually for a long time,
I have been developing this study called Open Business,
and the part of it I will talk about has actually become famous:
it’s about Tecnobrega.
The Open Business began about 3 or 4 years ago,
and it will go on for 2 more years.
We've investigated this appropriation of technology,
not only here, in Brazil,
but also in Colombia, Mexico, Argentina and Nigeria.
We wanted to understand
what happens when places we don’t expect,
when unimagined places appropriate technology,
and what is the impact of that, what kind of cultural industry,
what kind of relationships develop among people
when technology reaches places that, at least for us,
seem unexpected.
And here in Brazil we studied Tecnobrega in depth.
If you don’t know what Tecnobrega is, I’ll explain it quickly.
It is a mix of 80s-style electronic beats,
like Kraftwerk, stuff like that,
with the brega style of Odair José and so many others.
It is perfect to dance in pairs, as a couple,
and it is maybe one of the only styles of electronic music
to which people dance cheek-to-cheek.
Usually in electronic music it’s everyone within their own square.
What’s interesting about Tecnobrega is that,
every year, 400 new CDs are released.
We must remember that
a major label in Brazil today releases about 10 CDs per year.
And about 100 DVDs are released every year.
So, this is a musical and audiovisual industry.
The thing is if you go to a store to buy a Tecnobrega CD,
you won’t find it,
because there’s a direct distribution agreement with street vendors.
It’s as if you were bypassing the middlemen
and distributing all the music directly through the street vendors.
So, this is very curious,
because the way to make money are the so-called Sound System parties,
such as this one.
Their use of technology is very intensive.
This is a party in the outskirts of Belém.
Sound Systems are the companies that compete against one another,
to see who has the most sophisticated, the most modern equipment.
There is a true cult of technology,
every year the new Sound System equipment descends from the skies and people cheer.
It’s very moving.
For those who have never seen it,
they have laser beams, they have giant LED screens that only Ivete Sangalo has.
Their use of technology is very intensive.
This is the S for Superpop, one of the Sound Systems.
There are many other symbols: the T for Tupinambá,
The P for Príncipe ***,
well, I could stand here for hours showing symbols for Sound Systems.
This is the Sound System’s descent from the skies, so to speak.
And here’s another picture from the party, this is where CDs are sold.
So, if you want to purchase the music, you have to go to the street vendors.
Please note that this is not piracy,
because there’s an agreement between the musicians and performers
and the street vendors who sell Tecnobrega CDs and DVDs.
What’s important here-- I’ll be very brief--
is that it all begins with bands and DJs going into a home studio,
and recording their music in a very inexpensive way.
Then they take the master copy to distributors -- street vendors.
The audience, in turn, purchases the music and pays the street vendor.
And the party venues and Sound Systems book the bands and DJs,
so that, through them, the money moves up to the producers and DJs.
Another important phenomenon is that of festeiros,
who are kind of the investors in that market.
They invest money, as partners, or often lend money
to allow the Sound Systems to invest in equipment and everything.
So, it’s actually a leveraged market, from an economic perspective.
And the coolest thing is that the public also purchases CDs and DVDs
directly from the bands and DJs, after their live performances.
So, they capture the market of present value,
which is watching a performance and buying the CD and the DVD,
which is often more expensive than that of the street vendor,
which comes in a plastic bag without lyrics or anything else.
Whereas the sold CD after the concert comes with the lyrics and graphic material.
So, it’s interesting to see
how much this tells us about the way the value of music is changing.
This present value is grasped by the guys of Tecnobrega.
The figures, for those who may be interested, are available in a book,
which I’ve actually published,
in which we map the entire Tecnobrega productive chain,
describing how much each person makes.
And this is a multi-million dollar industry.
So, if you are interested in the figures, you can look it up later.
This scene is important because it has created the most popular performer in Brazil,
the Calypso band.
In a survey carried out by F/Nazca, some time ago,
Calypso was the number one most popular performer in Brazil,
beating Zezé di Camargo e Luciano.
The curious thing is that, from this Top 15, there are 3 other performers from
the same scene, so to speak. They have no label
and they distribute albums and CDs directly through street vendors.
It’s very curious that, among the most popular performers in Brazil,
many come from this new distribution model
which has spread all over Brazil.
And when I say that it has spread all over Brazil, I mean it.
Perhaps the most popular music in Brazil today is
music that is outside record labels,
outside mainstream media.
Examples of this are funk carioca, forró-- especially electronic forró,
lambadão cuiabano, I don’t know if anyone has heard lambadão cuiabano,
and pisadinha, which is the new nationwide craze.
You may not know it,
but most people in Brazil know about pisadinha,
it’s a very popular phenomenon.
And this is also a phenomenon of global ghettos.
The same is happening, for example, to the London grind.
There’s the dubstep, also in England,
there's Miami bass, in Miami.
There’s hip-hop in Baltimore, in Texas...
It’s the same distribution system used by Tecnobrega.
There’s also the kuduro from Angola,
which literally means “hard ***”.
There’s the publin, a style from Suriname
with a Rotterdam connection;
there’s the champeta, in Colombia, which I’m actually researching about right now--
it’s a very interesting scene.
There’s the cumbia-villera in Argentina,
which I’ve just finished researching— my report is ready—
and it’s very interesting because, over there, even street vendors are becoming obsolete.
People are using bluetooth now, to distribute music.
Even at ghetto concerts,
musicians send the song to people nearby via bluetooth,
it’s very interesting.
There’s the kwaito in South Africa,
the coupé-décalé in the Ivory Coast,
and so on.
What I wanted to call your attention to
is that we talk a lot about internet-based musicians.
We usually think of the Arctic Monkeys, Lilly Allen,
or, especially here in Brazil, of Mallu Magalhães.
It’s true! Mallu Magalhães owes much to the internet, career-wise.
But we never think of a band like Fantasmão, for example,
as internet-based musicians.
This is a band from Bahia. Here they are. And in early 2009,
I made a comparison to assess the popularity
of Fantasmão and Mallu Magalhães on the Internet.
So, for example, Mallu Magalhães had 140 Orkut communities,
the largest had 27,000 members.
Fantasmão had 810, the largest with 35,000 members.
Mallu Magalhães had 77 articles in mainstream media.
This means she’s also a mainstream musician, not only an internet-based one.
Fantasmão had 5, mostly in local and regional papers.
Mallu Magalhães had 2.5 million views on MySpace.
Fantasmão had 0, because ghetto bands in Brazil don’t use MySpace,
they essentially use Orkut and YouTube.
And on YouTube, the top Mallu Magalhães video had 532,000 views–
it was a TV interview she gave at Altas Horas, aired on Globo.
Meanwhile, Fantasmão had 790,000 views,
and it was a photomontage made by a fan, with a
Fantasmão song in the background.
So, the band hadn’t even made the video.
That’s the rule for most music in Brazil.
I’d thought about doing a YouTube tour
to show you other performers,
but I’ll leave that to another time,
as I’m running out of time
and I still need to address something that’s very important.
The second part of my presentation is very brief, and it’s about democracy.
What’s happening in Brazil is that,
the old idea that people never know how sausages or laws are made
is beginning to change.
People still don’t know how sausages are made,
but we’re beginning to figure out how laws come to be.
For those who have never been to one,
this is a public hearing at the House of Representatives.
It’s a very interesting, it’s as cool as TED.
I highly recommend you take a look at it.
Until now, that was the main form of popular participation
in the making of a law project.
This is beginning to change,
especially through a project I have just launched,
in a partnership with the Ministry of Justice,
I mean, FGV, where I work, in a partnership with the Ministry of Justice.
We have launched a project called Internet Civil Landmark.
To this day, 15 years later,
Brazil still doesn’t have a law to regulate the internet.
So, the idea is more or less this:
why not use the internet itself to write that law?
So, whoever wants to can visit the Civil Landmark website,
where the discussion is divided into topics,
and you have topics such as privacy,
freedom of speech, access rights, net neutrality...
And after 45 days, a discussion of principles will be carried out
about what this Brazilian internet law should encompass.
Should it protect privacy?
Should it protect free speech?
After these first 45 days, we’ll enter a second phase, which is
the text of the law itself, to be written by the Ministry of Justice.
From then on, anyone can comment on the text for 45 more days.
The expectation is that, around March 2010,
this text will have been sent to Congress
and it will possibly be the first collaborative law we have,
maybe even in the world.
So, I think it’s important for everyone here to participate.
To conclude, these are the comments we already have at the website.
I just wanted to answer that question of
why Chris Anderson is so interested in Brazil and
in the Brazil of Gaby Amarantos.
I think there are two factors.
I think we have a lot to offer
in transforming the economy of culture;
and I think we have a lot to offer
in renewing the experience of democratic practices.
That’s it, thank you.