11th
Mexican Bands Find Success via Cellphones - NYTimes.com
From: Mexican Bands Find Success via Cellphones - NYTimes.com
“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….
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. Inters 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.stead 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.
