2023-10-27 17:03:14
This has been a month of contrasts in the Spanish music industry, with two antagonistic news items. On the one hand, a certain Íñigo Quintero has debuted by sweeping it without anyone expecting it to the point of achieving global number one on Spotify. And on the other is the heterodox rapper from Valladolid Eric Uranuswith more than a decade of career behind him and the respect of a scene that has seen him collaborate with C. Tangana or Triángulo de Amor Bizarro, who, given the low ticket sales for his concert in Barcelona, broke the deck by publicly acknowledging the fiasco and making the decision to act for free.
Urano hopes to cover the expenses of the disaster with what he takes this Friday from his performance at the Barceló Theater in Madrid (8 p.m. Appetizer at 18 euros), but the most important thing is the debate it has opened about success and failure, and the sincerity of the artists about it. She answers us on the phone after finishing her workday at her ‘other’ job: the San Juan de Dios special education school, where she works with children with disabilities.
Does Madrid work better than Barcelona?
Yes, also for me Madrid is like playing at home, even more than Valladolid. Because of my collaborations with C. Tangana and Agorazein, because of my albums with Gamberros Pro, which is a legendary label from Madrid, there are people who even think that I am from there. In many press articles I have even been introduced as a ‘Madrid rapper’ (laughs).
The Apolo hall in Barcelona improved his conditions when he informed them that in the end he would perform for free due to low ticket sales. That’s not very common, is it?
It’s not, they behaved very well, they did their part by lowering the rent and I thank them for it.
The people who entered for free, I imagine they would take merchandising, right?
Yes, but we were unlucky in that we had a batch of t-shirts from my latest topic, ‘Radioactivity’, but there was a problem with the sealing oven and we lost the entire order. Since there were a lot of fans, almost everyone already had the merchandising that I brought… and the truth is that for all the people there was and as cheap as it was for them, there weren’t that many merchandising sales either.
What a messed up concert.
Yes, but at least we all had a good time and the audience gave me a lot of love. It was shown that many times it is not that there are few people who want to come see you, it is that the club does not have a penny. And also that due to the dictatorship of the algorithm, sometimes they don’t even know that you are going to perform. We niche artists are even losing the audience we had due to the evolution of information positioning systems. Things are getting ugly, because now Spotify is going to pay less to less ‘known’ artists, publishers are starting to kick out artists who don’t give them a certain number of views… It’s quite scary, because this is going to make that we end up missing out on great artists by not hitting the ball right away. It’s grotesque.
Everything started to get grotesque when the term ‘monetize’ became sacred, don’t you think?
Completely. When people like C. Tangana or I started in 2009 or 2010, we saw that we didn’t need anyone to edit and reach a large audience thanks to the internet. But when the algorithmic drift of content selection was imposed, that world of possibilities was greatly limited and now we are only beginning to see the consequences. The refinement of the algorithm does not follow consumer taste patterns, but rather the deterministic preferences of the industry. For example, as a music listener, the algorithm offers me less and less content that I like.
It’s a bit of the ironic criticism he made in his song ‘Dataísta’, when he says “humans lie, numbers don’t.”
Yes absolutely. We have reached a point where what the figures say is nothing more than the reality that the industry wants to impose.
Have you followed the meteoric rise of Íñigo Quintero? His team has revealed that influencers have been paid to talk about his song, that they have undertaken ambitious viralization campaigns on Spotify and Tiktok… Does this seem legitimate to you, or do you see it as a modern payola?
It is one hundred percent a modern payola. It is legal legally, but not ethically. And I find it very macabre in general. First, because it is seen that there are weak fringes: for example, the topic is not present in any Apple top, and on YouTube it does not have such a strong presence. There you can see how non-organic it is.
In his defense it can be said that there are other artists who follow the same strategy and do not obtain the same result. But of course, it starts with discrimination from the start because there are many other artists who have no way of financing these types of campaigns.
Exactly, it’s like tax engineering: legal but not ethical. If you have a lot of money you have many more tools at your disposal to pay less taxes than people who have less money. For this reason, just as in society, this process of destruction of what could be called ‘the middle class of musicians’ is taking place. The gap is getting bigger and bigger because the little ones have fewer and fewer resources and opportunities, and the big ones have more and more. It is based on a basic inequality that is increasingly insurmountable. And it’s fucked up because we’re talking about art, not cars. We are going to miss great works because they do not have the means to make good starting numbers. It’s like on Netflix: they put on a series, and if it doesn’t have a boom in two days, it’s out.
This generates inflated egos regardless of one’s status: no one wants to admit when something has gone wrong, because in this context it is seen as digging your own grave.
That’s why what I did in Barcelona caught so much attention. Nobody admits that something has gone wrong. I know that there are groups that announce: “Last tickets!”, and perhaps they haven’t sold even half of them. And so, the group finds itself in a spiral of pretending that horrifies me, and that has made me take this step to make the failure visible. Damn, these things happen, in music and in life. That if you fall, you don’t have to always get up as you fall. Sometimes you can lie there for a while assimilating that you have fallen, and nothing happens. The urban scene has a very young audience, and very dangerous ideas are being inoculated. I sometimes see profiles of artists that say: “If you haven’t gotten what you wanted, it’s because you haven’t fought enough for it.” That cryptobro thing is getting into music, and it’s really fucking bad.
Let’s sell a little about his concert, his latest single ‘Radioactivity’ and his future plans.
The concert covers my discography with an aesthetic linked to radioactivity, with visuals by Teresa Cano and with my usual DJ, Zar1 accompanying me.
The song has a Kraftwerkian influence and connects with other songs of his like ‘Choca’, with that kind of obsession with the atom, fission, techno-industrial dystopias…
Yes, it is something that is already very established in my imagination. Kraftwerk marked me a lot, and I was clear that this was the song I had to cover for that reason, because it connects with what I have been doing and with who I am. As for future plans, this is the first single from what will be my next album, which will be released next year.
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