SAO PAULO — It took practically a half century for Brazilian vocalist Cátia de França to discover her audience, however she lastly has — with the assistance of a near-obsolete audio innovation.
Born in Paraíba, a state in Brazil’s bad northeast area, 77-year-old de França’s mix of psychedelic rock with conventional rhythms and modernist poetry long went ignored, even as she visited the country in the 1970s and ’80s.
During the pandemic, she pulledback to a preservation location in the mountains above Rio de Janeiro, “where you can’t even picture an web signal,” she informed The Associated Press.
Then one day in 2021 her phone called. It was the co-founder of an independent label in Sao Paulo who desired to reissue her 1979 launching album, “20 Palavras ao Redor do Sol” (20 Words Around the Sun), on vinyl.
“I believed, ‘This should be a trick,’” de França remembered. “He began talking to me, and I recognized it wasn’t.”
De França has consideringthat been thrust into the spotlight, with fans and shows in the option circuit.
Her belated popularity mainly shows a revival taking location in Brazil, where last year vinyl records outsold CDs and DVDs for the veryfirst time in years. Revenue doubled to 11 million reais ($2.2 million) in 2023 from the prior year, and was more than 15 times greater than in 2019, according to Pro-Musica, an association of Brazil’s biggest record business. And those figures consistof just brand-new releases, as pre-owned sales are nearly difficult to track.
The market for utilized LPs neverever totally passedaway, and now is on the growth, stated Carlos Savalla, a 66-year-old music manufacturer in Rio who owns more than 60,000 vinyl records.
There are thousands of vinyl traders on sites and Facebook groups, while regional enthusiasts and foreign hunters search fairs, flea markets and utilized record stores in search of the samba, bossa nova, tropicalismo and Brazilian Popular Music LPs to total their collection.
Vinyl’s resurgence in Brazil follows a worldwide pattern over the last 15 years. In the U.S. alone, profits from vinyl records hit $1.4 billion in 2023, according to the Recording Industry Association of America. Recent restored American interest is insomecases associated to Taylor Swift, whose 2022 “Midnights” album endedupbeing the veryfirst significant album release to have its vinyl sales top CDs consideringthat1987 That year, Swift accounted for one of every 25 vinyl albums offered in the U.S.
In Brazil, rising interest isn’t due to top-streamed artists, who aren’t even launching records, stated Marcelo Fróes, a music reporter and scientist. Rather, today’s purchasers are listeners interested in getting timeless albums and finding brand-new artists or once-obscure artists.
By 2008, all of Brazil’s vinyl factories had shuttered. But, motivated by a revival in Europe and the U.S., manufacturer João Augusto and his partners chose to buy — and resuscitate — a previous