Mexican Bands Hear Success Calling
ONE of the biggest Latin hits of the past year arrived on the Billboard charts all the way from Caborca, a small desert hill town in the Mexican state of Sonora, mostly thanks to a cellphone.
Los Tigres del Norte recorded what was probably the first Mexican tribute to the cellphone.
Los Pikadientes de Caborca had a hit last year with “La Cumbia del Río,” a song the group originally shared with friends via cellphone.
Last year Los Pikadientes de Caborca recorded “La Cumbia del Río” — a bare-boned singalong about dancing and partying by the side of a local river — on a home computer, uploaded it to their cellphones and, with help from Bluetooth and Memory Sticks, shared it with friends. The song quickly went viral, and its grass-roots popularity led to heavy rotation on radio stations across Sonora; before long, cellphone videos of people dancing to the song were flooding YouTube.
Los Pikadientes had no record label, but suddenly they were the digital darlings of regional Mexican music, with a hit on both sides of the border.
Sony offered the band a record deal and rereleased “La Cumbia del Río,” which spent six weeks at No. 1 on Billboard’s Regional Mexican chart. The song’s ring tone sold more than 150,000 copies in the United States, and the band released a debut album, “Vámonos Pa’l Río,” which was nominated for a 2008 Grammy. The song is still on the Latin charts.
“We have to be honest; we wouldn’t exist without cellphones and ring tones,” said Francisco Gonzalez (who goes by the single name Pancho) of Los Pikadientes, whose new album is scheduled for June, complete with an elaborate ring-tone marketing plan. “We ended up doing eight months of promotion in the United States because of that one song. We’re the ultimate cellphone success story.”
As most sectors of the music industry scramble to cope with the way the Internet and online stores like iTunes have changed how music is distributed and consumed, the regional Mexican industry is focused elsewhere, on the power of the cellphone as both a one-stop music source and a symbol of working-class immigrant identity. This is no small news, considering that in the United States regional Mexican music — the term is an industry label that groups together norteño, ranchera, banda and other traditional styles — is responsible for close to 60 percent of all Latin sales, outperforming all other genres of Latin music, including pop and tropical.
“Our songwriters used to only want to write for pop artists,” said Delia Orjuela, assistant vice president for Latin music at the performing rights organization BMI. “Now they all want to write for regional Mexican artists. This is a direct result of demographics. Mexicans are everywhere now.”
Because fans of regional Mexican music tend to be working-class immigrants and their United States-born children, they don’t fit the typical musical consumption patterns of the digital age. They most likely don’t own a home computer, don’t use a credit card and don’t have broadband at home, all prerequisites for an iTunes account. Instead they buy prepaid phone cards with cash and use their cellphones as mobile, personal jukeboxes, often downloading ring tones from their cellular providers for about $3 each, three times the price from iTunes or Zune.
“This audience has adopted the mobile phone as their primary means of communication,” said Oliver Buckwell of the marketing agency Tribal Brands, which has set up deals between Verizon and regional Mexican acts. “It is also now their primary means of getting music.”
In the Anglo market the majority of digital sales take place online; in regional Mexican music an estimated 85 percent of digital music is purchased on cellphones.
“This is a very mobile population,” said Michael Grasso, a former vice president for consumer marketing at AT&T, where he set up sponsorships with Mexican artists like Joan Sebastian and Marco Antonio Solis. “As consumers their behaviors depend on communication with family who might not be in the same state or same country as they are. They have national and international behaviors, local lines and shared content that go between countries on a daily basis. Phones are the easiest way to keep those family connections together.”
Sensing the rising power of regional Mexican music’s fan base and keeping an eye on general Latin consumer trends (Latinos were twice as likely as non-Latinos to purchase ring tones in 2008), every major phone company has made deals with regional Mexican acts: sponsoring concert tours, offering “mobile tickets” to shows, bundling song downloads and ring tones with phone subscriptions and selling phone cards emblazoned with the faces of popular bands like Los Temerarios everywhere from Wal-Mart to weekend swap meets. (Call to collect your minutes, and a member of the band greets you.) While AT&T began sponsoring tours in 2004, only now is there unanimous agreement among phone companies that regional Mexican is central to the future of mobile music.
“We see regional Mexican fans as the gateway to educating all U.S. consumers about mobile music,” said Ed Ruth, the director of digital music at Verizon, which is expected to announce a new mobile music deal this month at the Billboard Latin Music Conference. “Because they have a higher tendency to access content on their phones, they are more open to trying new products and to new ways of engaging with their favorite artists.”
Late last year Verizon — which introduced its V Cast mobile music platform in 2006 — spearheaded a deal with the popular telenovela “Fuego en la Sangre,” precisely because of its regional Mexican fan base. The show starred the singer and heartthrob Pablo Montero, and its opening theme was “Para Siempre,” a popular ranchera ballad by the Mexican star Vicente Fernández. Verizon held concerts with Mr. Montero in its stores, where select customers could appear with him in a music video, shot against a green screen and then sent directly to their Verizon phones.
“Phone carriers are more interested in regional Mexican than any other genre,” said Skander Goucha, vice president for digital at Universal Music Latin Entertainment. “No other genre has that kind of mobile sales.” He added that the sales of a ring tone for a single by Alacranes Musical, a popular Mexican act from Chicago, were in the Top 20 of all Universal ring tones, which “puts them right up there next to Akon and Fall Out Boy.”
Of course fans of Alacranes Musical might also be fans of Akon and Fall Out Boy, especially if they’re second-generation and raised on a steady binational diet of Mexican and American sounds. For these younger listeners, born in the United States, keeping regional Mexican songs on their cellphone is an easy way to maintain family roots.
“Feeling like you’re close to home is so important for Mexican audiences,” said Leila Cobo, Billboard’s executive director for Latin content. “In recent years it’s stopped being taboo to be Latin or Mexican. Assimilation is not the only option. For the younger fans it’s cool to like these artists and be proud of where you’re from.”
That phone companies and ring-tone providers are paying attention to this trend is a change from what many in the Mexican music industry characterize as years of willful, often culturally biased neglect from marketing and advertising agencies. Despite their commercial success, few norteño or banda artists — with their cowboy hats, horses, accordions and tubas — typically end up with the kind of major marketing and advertising deals that go to artists like Shakira or Enrique Iglesias, who embrace a more cross-cultural look and sound.
“The decision makers who sit atop the major marketing companies tend to be people who do not understand the depth and importance of this community,” said Peggy Dold, a freelance marketing consultant and former international vice president at the Spanish-language media giant Univision. “With cellphones that’s all starting to change.”
Back in 1992 Los Tigres del Norte, the Northern California group that has been a regional Mexican institution for decades (and has worked closely with Verizon), recorded what was probably the first Mexican tribute to the cellphone, “El Celular.” The lyrics treated the new device as both status symbol and social nuisance, and in the song’s video a primitive cellphone the size of a sneaker upstaged the band everywhere from the golf course to the nightclub.
“In those days not everyone could afford a cellphone,” said Jorge Hernández, the band’s singer. “Now all of our fans have them, and they’re a big part of their identity. They’ve made us change the way we think about our music.
“Before we worried about getting the physical CDs into the little neighborhood stores. Now we worry about getting our songs onto those phones.”
We've spent a great deal of time in the class talking about innovation as far as composition, composers, performs, and musicians are concerned - but what about innovation in the technology field - that is, how the innovation has changed and shaped the music industry and music as an art form? I think this article is very thought provoking. Think about performances before cell phones . . . before You Tube . . . before recordings . . . when a symphony would only be heard when one traveled great distances to a large city to see the philharmonic - or when a community orchestra gave honest performances in humble venues.
ReplyDeleteI spent some time in Ann Arbor visiting the University of Michigan and got on an interesting topic with a pianist friend of mine. We discussed his theory that recordings have changed the way that we approach music and music making. Instead of going to a concert anxiously anticipating a work that is rarely heard, often times audiences are well educated and well versed in the piece due to recordings. A cellist playing Bach suites will be subjected to intence critisicm for interpretation, intonation, sound quality, etc. - or an orchestra concert of Beethoven will be heard through the perspective of a listener exposed to the recordings of Karajan with Berlin or You Tube videos of Berstein with New York Phil.
What does that mean for us as musicians? Perhaps we have become so focused on the performance that the music itself - the emotion and ideas or simply the sounds that the composers are trying to convey have been lost. Or perhaps recordings have done us a favor, bringing the overall level of detail and attention of our music making to a higher quality and refining our music making process.
Also - in one more question - there is no doubt that innovations in technology has made music more accessible. I think that this accessibility has brought both good developments and new and interesting challenges. While there is so much music easily accessible, I feel that there is a casual approach and that the discipline and respect toward understanding music has been lost in the process. Of course, there is an aspect of immediate appreciation for classical music, and music in general - but truly one can see how music has become a popular icon and often times packaged with sex, drugs, and money to provide an attractive product that will sell quickly and on a large scale.
Thoughts?