music industry makes Brazil: how to make a profit by giving music away

watches Brazil: how to make a profit by giving music away
BELEM, Brazil — On the poor outskirts of Belem, the club Mansao de Forro was starting to fill up by midnight on a swelteringly humid Thursday night. Girls in tight jeans and heels sipped drinks from plastic cups while boys in long shorts circled around them.

As the hit "Amor Virtual" — Virtual Love — began to play, a dark-haired boy in blue flowery shorts spun around a tall, elegant blonde girl while her friends watched, shaking their hips. The sound of "tecno-brega," Belem’s indigenous computer pop, never fails to get the dance-floor moving. “I like it because you can dance to it,” said Jessica dos Santos, 18, a waitress. “All my friends like it.”

"Tecno-brega," literally cheesy techno, is a brash mixture of tinny electronic beats and shrill, sugary vocals. Produced locally, it has developed a unique business model. In tecno-brega, music is given away for free.

All over the remote Amazonian state of Para, from speakers strung from lamp posts in tiny villages to booming Belem car stereos, you will hear little else. “This is our sound, our rhythm,” said Jose Roberto, a computer programmer for the Brazilian Air Force who runs Belem’s bregapop website — tecno-brega’s biggest portal. “It is its own universe. That’s why I wanted to spread

Tecno-brega artists distribute their music for free via DJs, street vendors and the internet, hoping to build a reputation and gain lucrative live shows. In Brazil, pirated Hollywood DVDs and CDs by major artists are openly sold on the streets. In tecno-brega, there are no official releases — groups make and produce their own CDs. “If you don’t have an official CD,” observed Roberto, “then what is piracy?”

The model of free music distribution, which started with tecno-brega in Belem, has now spread to other "ghetto" music forms like Rio Funk.

The sound began around 2000, evolving out of an earlier local music style called "brega," or cheesy. Prompted by cheap computer technology, producers began mixing romantic Brazilian brega pop with electronic music and rhythms like reggaeton and reggae from the nearby Caribbean. Its pioneers were the group Calypso — judged the most listened-to band in Brazil in a 2007 survey —who pull in crowd of 30,000-plus for live shows.

“The crisis in the music industry is widely talked about,” said Ronaldo Lemos, from the respected Brazilian research institute Fundacao Getulio Vargas — one of the authors of an extensive 2008 study on tecno-brega’s unique industry and business model. In Brazil alone, CD sales fell from 94 million in 2000 to 52.9 million in 2005. “Tecno-brega is an industry that makes millions, but it is a completely different model of business,” said Lemos. “It doesn’t see technology as an enemy but as an opportunity.”
coppied by http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/brazil/100729/music-piracy-techno

Now watches see Final plug on Gulf oil leak at least days away

We are saw this Final plug on Gulf oil leak at least days away

NEW ORLEANS – The government official overseeing the Gulf oil spill response said Saturday he wants additional tests done before ordering BP to finish drilling a relief well that will help plug the runaway well for good.
Retired Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen told reporters it could be late Monday or early Tuesday before officials know the results of those tests, which will be designed to minimize any potential risks with the final plugging procedure.
If Allen gives his final order to proceed with the relief well then, it could be next weekend before the relief well intercepts the blown-out well. Once that happens, engineers will pump in mud and cement to plug the well from below, a process known as the bottom kill.
Before that happens, Allen wants to know if pressure inside the well has to be decreased. He has instructed BP to provide an analysis to determine if the bottom kill could risk damaging the well further without some kind of pressure relief.
BP began drilling its primary relief well in early May to permanently seal the ruptured well. But about two weeks ago, around the time the company had done a successful static kill pumping mud and cement into the top of the well, executives began signaling that the bottom kill procedure might not be done. In recent days, Allen suggested that was a possibility.
But pressure tests this week reaffirmed the original plan.
"The relief well will be finished and the bottom kill will be executed," he said.

A month after plugging the wellhead in the Gulf of Mexico, the waters that were once blackened with gushing crude are now a clear mossy green, lapping the sides of ships stationed near the wellhead. On Saturday, the only dark shadows on the water appeared to be caused by clouds in an otherwise clear sky.
Despite the end of the immediate disaster, however, about a dozen ships are located near the relief wells, overseeing undersea robots and standing by to help with any containment needs that might arise.
Several miles away, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration research vessel had been slowly circling the site, using sonar to search for undersea oil leaks that might have been pushed up from the pressure of the cap on the wellhead. The ship has taken 384 water samples since July 28 that were being sent back to a lab to be tested for oil and, if necessary, matched to the same crude that had soiled the Gulf.
So far, Anne K. Lynch, commanding officer of the Henry B. Bigelow, said crews have not found anything to suggest a significant leak since the July 15 blocking of the crude from gushing into the Gulf.
"There's nothing scary," she said.
Allen also said that BP's failed blowout preventer may be replaced before the relief well is completed. He said when it is replaced, officials will take precautions to preserve it for evidence.
Investigators want to analyze the contraption to determine why it failed to prevent the Deepwater Horizon explosion April 20 that killed 11 workers and caused 206 million gallons of oil to spew from the well a mile beneath the surface of the Gulf of Mexico.
Meanwhile, BP warned residents of the Gulf region to watch out for scammers posing as company employees and seeking personal information or money for "safety training" and other purposes.
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Associated Press Writer Noaki Schwartz contributed to this report from aboard the NOAA ship Henry B. Bigelow.
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