Maztruz com Leite For All: Folk-Communication or a New Cultural Industry of the Brazilian Northeast INTERCOM Sociedade Brasileira

a de Estudos Interdisciplinares da Comunicao XXIV Congresso Brasileiro da Comunicao Campo Grande /MS September 2001 Ciro Jos Peixoto Pedroza Escola de Comunicaes e Artes/USP Translation: Michael Silvers Abstract: A new radio project via satellite, supported by a business strategy that works with manifestations of popular culture and which utilizes advanced technological resources and conquered the consumer market of cultural goods from northeastern Brazil, consolidates a new pole of production for the culture industry and inverts traditional flows of information dependent on the Rio-So Paulo axis.

In the nine states that comprise the northeastern region of Brazil existin the same time and spaceeconomic poverty and cultural richness. There are years in which, in the middle of this devastated land, a highly profitable business known as the drought industry flourishes. It is an activity that derives its very existence from a plague and consumes millions of dollars every year without ever signaling the improvement of living conditions for thousands of Brazilians who suffer from a lack of water and food in the most arid region of the nation. While drought makes hunger and poverty the post-card image of the region and thousands of northeasterners migrate throughout the country and even the world to escape from it, there is still a trace of unity that remains immutable and increasingly strong: culture. In the middle of all this appeared a business strategy based on the power of the radio and that utilized elements of northeastern popular culture and the most advanced technology: the network Somzoom Sat, the most popular radio in Brazil. Responsible for this phenomenon is businessman Emanoel Gurgel, once the owner of a small t-shirt factory in the 1990s, who began working with forr bands and created a business with a current income of US$3 million per month, year round, and has become the biggest businessman of the cultural industry of the Northeast.

The network Somzoom Sat includes 98 broadcasters spread among 95 cities in 15 states of Brazil, producing, wholly or partially, including on the internet, 24 hours of live programming generated by an independent studio based in the business's headquarters in the city of Fortaleza. Initially, the network transmitted via satellite programming based exclusively on the most traditional music of the northeast, forr, with presenters transmitting information with typical northeastern regional language. The bands and musicians produced by the label Somzoom Studio, which belongs to the same group and parent company as many of the businesses of Emanoel Gurgel, were more than mere radio programming attractions for a network of broadcasters. Except in rare and honorable exceptions made to the classics of music legend Luiz Gonzaga, all the programming was dominated by house bands, who had a guaranteed place with rights to numerous repetitions on the 24 hours of programming on the Somzoom network. Another strong element of the network is the participation of the northeastern audience spread throughout the country, via telephone, fax or email. This continues to be perhaps one of the most important points in the operation of Somzoom, but the holy grail of the business is undoubtedly the promotion of the record label's own products on the radio. Today, the programming of the Somzoom network has changed. The plastic forr of the bands and singers produced by Somzoom Studio continue to comprise the majority of the programming, but they no longer have exclusive airplay. Listeners that tune into one of the 98 stations that transmit the network's signal across Brazil can now hear romantic music, themes from novelas (soap operas), and hits from pagode bands that appear on TV. Behind the assault on the media, like the tactics of the Evangelicals, in which they initially buy stations and subsequently lease part of the programming in major cities of the Northeast, the business strategy of the network Somzoom involves many more businesses than the production of regionalized radio programming.

In truth, the radio is the medium through which businessman Emanoel Gurgel promotes his businesses, including the promotion of shows and the production, sale, and distribution of CDs, either through traditional box stores, or through alternative systems like representatives, magazines, journals, and a virtual store.

MEDIA, TECHNOLOGY AND THE CULTURAL INDUSTRY Created in Fortaleza, the capital of the state of Cear, in 1991, the band Mastruz com Leite is synonymous with success today. Initially just a forr band, Mastruz originated a conglomerate of companies and businesses directed personally by Emanoel Gurgel. Moreover, Mastruz com Leite established a new aesthetic for traditional northeastern music, created a new model of operation and of production and promoted a revolution in the cultural industry of northeastern Brazil denominated Oxente! Music in a clear alusion to Ax Music from the state of Bahia. In the limits of a city block on Heris do Acre Avenue in the Passar neighborhood, Mastruz com Leite housed itself in a complex network of business and economic interests, of market and media, utilizing northeastern cultural references and the most advanced technology to make itself present, yearround, in every Brazilian state. With the growth of consumer demand, principally among the youth audience throughout the region and among youth with northeastern roots in other regions, the businesses and products of Mastruz com Leite were expanding. From the original band at the start of the decade, another eight bands formed, modeled after the original, each taking turns performing in more than 100 weekly shows throughout Brazil. In addition to the bands themselves, there also exist bands and artists that are managed by Mastruz com Leite and utilize all the media structure and production support of the group. In Fortaleza, Mastruz com Leite installed a modern recording studio and created the label Somzoom. To provide support to the label, Emanoel Gurgel created a structure worthy of the major labels to create hits, to

package and distribute them to the farthest corners of Brazil. On the back of this revolution, the group began to invest in another tradition dear to the northeastern people: the rodeo (called a vaquejada in northeastern Brazil). Beginning in ancient times, the rodeo lost, with the years of drought and exodus, its importance. Now it has resurged in a new format, coupled with concerts and million dollar awards. Mastruz com Leite invested in this practice and even created a Mastruz com Leite Rodeo Circuit, which promoted a series of rodeos throughout the northeastern region and even in Rio de Janeiro. To support its bands, its exclusive and managed artists, and the rodeo circuit, as well as to promote its own production, the group utilized the radio, through Somzoom Sat. On the network's programming, the focus is entirely on the hits of the bands owned by the group, and of the artists managed and recorded by the label Somzoom, as well as on regional and national news, which is presented in the same manner as traditional northeastern broadcasters. To accommodate unaffiliated musicians, the network institutionalized payola. The musician purchases a quantity of radio spots, like with other commercial radio broadcasters [payola is still common in Brazil], paid in cash or in shows, and then receives a guarantee that the music will be played, along with an advertisement of the musician's album during the program. To further expand his communications network, Emanoel Gurgel also invested in print media, creating the magazine Conexo Vaquejada, which specializes in the coverage of the shows and events promoted by his group, principally during the Mastruz com Leite Rodeo Circuit. In addition to the stories on cowboys, farmers, services for animals, and products used by those involved in the rodeo, the magazine also offers articles on Somzoom Studio musicians and bands and, as a bonus, the CDs produced by the label. With this effort, Mastruz com Leite killed two birds with one stone: it put an end to the myth of the seasonality of northeastern popular music, before only played during the June Festivals, and to the historic dependency of the culture and media industry on Rio de Janeiro and So Paulo, which today are

beginning to yield to this phenomenon. The music produced by Mastruz com Leite plays year round, the bands and musicians controlled by the group perform weekly shows in every state in the country, and when the June Festivals arrive, the band's business explodes, with the sale of discs and, principally, with shows. Proof of this are the repeated broken sales records that have already accumulated approximately three million discs sold. They have created a structure that today supersedes the more traditional regional poles of cultural production and events Salvador and Recife with their in- and out-of-season carnivals. This structure survives independently and indifferently of everything. It grows in shocking proportions and with frightening force.

A GLOCAL RADIO NETWORK It seems like academic research on the radio would be commonplace, but the quantity of studies dedicated to this nearly hundred-year-old medium is lamentable when compared to texts that analyze the print media and principally the TV. The force and capacity of the penetration of the radio is indisputable. It is present in the daily lives of millions of people, practically in every place on the planet, in urban centers or in rural areas, always with tremendous mobility, immediacy, instantaneity, sensuousness, autonomy, agility, and low cost. Furthermore, the radio uses oral language and does not require, unlike the print media, that the listener be literate to consume its messages. Teresa Patrcia de S Teixeira also notes another important feature: the radio possesses a flexible agenda. It can fit into the daily lives of people or into the city. Its hours and programming can be changed based on the emergent necessities more easily and simply than the television can (1998: 14). Contrary to the pessimistic predictions of many media scholars who advocated and continue to advocate the end of the radio, due to the rise of new media, it has, on the contrary, continued to resist, adapt itself, modernize itself, renovate itself, being reborn each day. And in the midst of this eternal

resistance, new studies are beginning to appear, new perspectives and new reflections about this important medium. Spread through the world, there are numerous examples and stages in which you can find the radio. From the old and potent short-wave radio to the waves of the World Wide Web, passing through satellites and digital systems of transmission, the radio renovates itself with live examples of modernization. There are examples of highly segmented broadcasters, like those that were enormous networks for the transmission of news or entertainment. Crookes and Vittet-Phillipe, cited by Tereza Patrcia de S Teixeira, illustrate well this diversity in European radio: Green, red or black, pirate or legal, public or private, community, intimate, commercial, free or liberating, decentralized, returning the word to the listener or not regulated, ingeniously professional or painfully amateur, parochial, provincial or regional, the local radio stations of Europe compose a kaleidoscope of spectacular diversity (1998: 26). It is no different in Brazil. There is an enormous variety of examples, from the network of loudspeakers on posts spread through the middle of the street in the periphery of the cities or in small communities in the interior, to the networks of FM broadcasters via satellite, to the low power stations, called community stations, heirs to the free European radios that, in the 70s, protested against state monopoly. For the commercial broadcasters, the vast majority in Brazil, where you can observe the occurrence of a massification of formats and programs, the idea of segmented audiences gained prominence since the 1960s. Almost forty years later, due to the overcrowding of the dial by commercial and community stations, fighting minute-to-minute for the attention of the listener with their numerous attractions, the occurrence of the segmentation of programming on the part of the broadcasters has become increasingly more common.

There are broadcasters that segment their programming by taking geography into consideration, specifically concerning the proximity and force of local radio. Others take culture into account to segment their products. Still, segmentation was a strategy implemented to allow the very medium to survive. The radio, once a focal point and controller of the entire audience, started to lose prominence at the moment the TV occupied its space in the center of the living room and took control of the audience, the artists and producers, the public funds, and the prestige, condemned to a slow and painful death. With the redeeming discovery of the transistor, the radio was reborn and earn new momentum and a new form. The size became smaller, the cost was reduced, it could be placed anywhere in the home, it entered the car, it became an alarm clock and a children's toy, and began speaking various languages and accents to attend to the various audiences that listened to it in different locales. This phenomenon was reproduced around the word and since then, the radio has never been the same. Benefitting from technological advances that ended up lowering the cost of equipment and facilitating operation and transport, the radio arrived at the end of the century renovated. The digital concept began to be part of the daily routine of broadcasters around the world, and computers took on various functions within the studios: recorder for programs, music and vignettes; station manager; and even the manager of what goes on air. This fact has permitted the stations in the most developed cities and stations in Brazil's rural interior to operate with practically the same technology. This ultimately allows, also, that initiatives like Radio Somzoom Sate can arise in Fortaleza, far from the Rio-So Paulo axis, transmitting programming via satellite based on northeastern music and culture to stations all over Brazil and via internet to Web surfers around the world. For the purpose of spreading music, radio is the medium par excellence, the ideal for the distribution and promotion of the principal product of the group Mastruz com Leite, which controls the network: its music. Another import aspect is regionalism. Somzoom speaks from the Northeast in a

northeastern accent and this makes a difference, as Zita de Andrade Lima teaches. Due to the sociocultural complex of the Brazilian man, he

likes to hear about places and problems are familiar to him. He likes the language employed by the communicator who has his same accent, his same way of talking, with a malice that will escape outsiders, but delights him. This faith and this language is what make the messages of the regional radio worthy of great credibility, and that can be understood in the translation specifically designed for the listener, and that will be indecipherable in long-distance transmissionabroadto outsiders (1969: 36-7). Similarly, it is worth mentioning another important aspect of the radio: oral language. And because orality is a cultural marker of the Northeast, a region of Brazil with a large quantity of illiterate people, radio is well suited to the purpose of Somzoom Sat. Some thinkers also suggest that the radio, because of its characteristics and principally due to its capacity to be interactive ever since its appearance even before the rise of the concept of interactivity must be an eminently local vehicle. This idea leads us to the idea of the radio of proximity developed by the French. As such, Wedell and Crooks highlight this among others affective factors, which are related to basic themes of human existence and that provoke emotions or instincts (Teixeira 1998: 88). It is because of this that Somzoom Sat bases its programming on and speaks directly to the northeasterners who still live in the region, but principally to the northeasterners who migrate to other regions. Thus, it assumes in practice a glocal character, maintaining its regional connections, but in tune with globalization without losing its audience or identity and without stopping being local.

FINAL CONSIDERATIONS When he reflected on radio as a medium, Marshall Mcluhan gave it excessive importance considering what he sees and as it is treated in the market, among the media, and even among academics. Still, by comparing it to an extension of the central nervous system, [which] is only equalled by human speech itself, Mcluhan (1989) ends up referring us to an opportune and necessary reflection about the

role of the radio in the life of man. For the Brazilian, radio has a greater importance than it seems. Gilberto Mendoa Telles, for example, points to a fact that further reenforces the role of the radio in Brazil: in a country where people read little, what you hear has great importance, he says. And no wonder that, even with all the advances seen on the television networks and on the so-called new media, the radio continues to be playing its role as a daily companion for millions of people. Thus the strategic importance of the radio for business for the group Mastruz com Leite, with its 24 hour daily programming, transmitted by a network of 98 stations, working in 95 cities in 15 Brazilian states, it constructs its image, demonstrates its novelty and makes the medium into a a live and interactive storefront for the sale of the products to the market.

BIBLIOGRAPHY LIMA, Zita de Andrade Regionalizao do rdio e desenvolvimento nacional, in Revista Vozes, ano 63, n 1, Petrpoles, janeiro de 1969, p.36-37. MCLUHAN, Marshall. Os meios de comunicao como extenso do homem, So Paulo, Cultrix, 1989. TEIXEIRA, Teresa Patrcia de S-Todas as vozes: diferentes abordagens para um conceito de rdio local, So Bernardo do Campo/SP: UMESP, 1998. Dissertao de Mestrado.