2023-10-10 22:29:11
Sometimes plans don’t go as expected. But you can react. Erik Martín, known artistically as Erik Urano (Valladolid, 1986), will give a concert with free admission at the Sala Apolo in Barcelona this Friday, October 13. That was not the initial idea. Tickets were on sale for 14 euros but they were selling poorly. He had two options: cancel it or lose money. But a third was invented.
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It was an idea of the manager and the label, Sonido Muchacho (home of La Bien Querida, Carolina Durante or Confetti de Odio): to do the concert with free admission. “I have prepared a light show that revolves around a whole throughout my musical career that is rehearsed and we want to do yes or yes,” he explains to elDiario.es and emphasizes that he wanted to “be honest and transparent with the fact that “Things went bad.”
The musician accepted the suggestion and communicated the change of plans on his networks: to attend his concert you only needed to reserve the ticket. In less than 48 hours the tickets ran out. What was anticipated as a devastating spectacle, that sad image of seeing the almost empty venue from the stage, will be a resounding success; although not financially.
The commercialization of art
Erik Urano’s idea is to compensate the losses from the free concert in Barcelona with the profits from the one in Madrid, whose entrance fee remains at 18 euros (plus management fees) on October 27 at the Barceló hall. The artist acknowledges the help of the Sala Apolo, which made things easier by changing the conditions to “much better” ones. “We value being able to release a project that we have been working on for a long time even though it is not profitable, only because of the work we have done and because of the fans who wanted to listen to it,” he says in a telephone conversation after leaving his other job, as an educational assistant. in a special education center.
I would love to give free concerts, but it can’t be at the cost of not paying professionals what they deserve.
Putting tickets on sale at zero cost goes, for him, beyond the marketing or virality. Erik Urano wants to open a conversation: “In such a mercantilist era for art, it cannot be that only what is profitable in economic terms survives,” and adds that “many of the projects that have gone down in history have not been profitable.” and then they have had a brutal social significance in what has come later.” “We are missing out on artistic projects, in many disciplines, because they do not generate money from scratch. Many times it is not interesting to promote what is outside the margin,” he insists.
But not always free
In this concert he has created an idea in which everything “will revolve around the concept of radioactivity”, the name of his latest song, with references to the electronic group Kraftwerk. Erik Urano has been making music for more than 10 years and has played at festivals such as Primavera Sound or BBK. Much of the urban genre scene supported Urano by sharing his post.
The decision, he assures, has been emotionally hard and unexpected, given the rapper’s enthusiasm for playing in Barcelona. Of course, when asked if he would give more free concerts, he emphasizes not wanting to romanticize the precariousness of the sector. “The culture already has very bad conditions in itself. I run a professional team that has to get paid. A production team and a DJ that I have to pay. “I would love to give free concerts, but it cannot be at the cost of not paying professionals what they deserve.” “People have to get used to paying for things,” he says, and he hopes “to have given a lesson that art and culture must be above economic pretension, but it should not be done at a loss of money either.”
Artists such as, for example, Rosalía, Quevedo or Bizarrap maintain constant and exponential growth. “But they are the exception that confirms the rule and not reality. People who start making music can sometimes think that sudden success is normal and it is not. The normal thing, and more so in music, is to have ups and downs,” he says. “There are musicians who, if they do not have sold out when announcing a tour or are not in the top “Of the most listened to artists, when they release music they seem to fail,” emphasizes the artist who has songs with a best-seller like C Tangana.
The dictatorship of the algorithm
“What bothers me the most is to think that they have done to me shadow banning”, He says in reference to the fact that the social media positioning algorithm can hide his publications, it is proposed. According to the artist himself, when his post It reached a certain virality on social networks, many fans contacted him saying that they had not even heard about his live shows. “The algorithm wasn’t even showing my content to the people listening to me. “What’s the point of promoting yourself through networks?” He questions himself while remembering that he had to do the opposite of what was “normal” so that “publication on networks worked.”
“Spotify’s algorithm marks what we listen to. It’s a snowball that makes artists and listeners go to the same thing”
“Spotify’s algorithm also marks what we listen to. In the end it is a snowball that makes artists and listeners always go to the same thing,” he says. For him, this set of systematic and computer operations is “the materialization of a toxic industry.” “It is also a scourge for great artists, which often forces them to always do the same thing: the people with many visits are the ones who have to continue generating them. “What is known to work is constantly exploited.”
For him, the algorithm represents a kind of differentiation between classes: “There are fewer and fewer medium-sized artists. There are some with a lot of power, wealth, listeners and influence and there are people with few resources and little ability to generate a social lift. It is no longer as easy to grow on the internet as it was before.” In this sense, he remembers that although listening is an important part of artists’ income, “there are many more ways to support a musician, such as buying merchandising or go to their concerts.”
Mishmash at festivals
Erik Urano agrees with the words of Juancho Marqués, who in an interview assured elDiario.es that the best way to enjoy an artist is still in a concert in a hall. After being in several macro festivals, he considers that they have become something more similar to “an amusement park company than a cultural proposal in which you meet new artists.” Although he assumes that not all of these events “are bad” and that in them “many fans can attend 15 concerts that interest them,” they produce contradictions. “Artists have worse conditions at macro festivals, class biases are created in the public since whoever pays more for their entry, the better conditions they have, there are very bad conditions for workers and they squander public money,” he says, listing his criticisms of festivals. .
“I see the concept of music as a niche in which to have fun and forget about the bad for a while,” as well as a “spiritual elevation through art.” The artist predicts that he feels “too much of a rapper for electronics and too electronic for rap.”
Politics in music
Erik Urano usually says that he does not want to be explicitly political. However, everything presented here acquires a political dimension. When I ask him this question, he answers. “Yes, totally”. “Making your reality visible often already has a brutal political charge. I always give the example of Yung Beef when he says ‘fuck the eviction notices’. Bringing that reality to so many people already has a brutal political position although it may not seem like it,” he explains.
In addition, he is concerned about the cultural policies of the extreme right, as has been seen recently in cases of censorship. In his city, Valladolid, he governs the Popular Party with Vox. “They are people capable of anything to bring it to their ideological niche. They do not even respond to ideological bases of right-wing liberals,” he says. “But thank goodness that politics does not depend only on politicians,” he concludes.
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