• Submitted by: manso
• Arts and Culture
• 01 / 10 / 2011

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Autor: Mario Vizcaino Serrat |  09 de Enero 2011. Specialists, musicians, artists, and producers from several Latin American and Caribbean countries have pinned their hopes on a network of record companies of the Cultural ALBA initiative, about which they met in Havana.

The first meeting on this integrationist project was organized by Cubadisco – Cuba’s most important recording company and trade show - and the Cuban Music Institute. All activities were held at the ALBA Center, in Havana’s Vedado district.

Although it is a difficult and complex enterprise, with the challenge of protecting authors against piracy, the meeting attempted to draw up a strategy to facilitate the processes of production, advertising and marketing of record labels - both musical and audiovisual work – in the region.

This initiative, whose importance is as great as it is complex, has the participation of record labels and Ministries of Culture of the member states of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA, for its Spanish acronym). It also counts on the collaboration of figures from the music world from other nations of the continent.

The truth is that it is an ambitious plan that includes other incentives, such as the creation of the ALBA Record Award, which according to Cuban musicologist Cary Diez, who is also the regional coordinator of this network, “is aimed at encouraging young artists, creation movements and projects on musical heritage that are not registered or have not had the possibility of entering into the circuit of promotion and commercialization.”

That is why the award will be related to the future that this network wants for its productions, to creative work and its revival in the service of culture and to fundamentals that led to setting up the network of ALBA record companies.

The growth of this kind of alliance, whose objectives are fair-minded and laudable, will almost certainly also depend on important factors such as transnational companies involved in show business and entertainment, the hegemony of distribution mechanisms and the substantial decline in compact disk sales (audio and DVDs) that has been registered worldwide in recent years due to the circulation of music on the Internet.

Promoters of this network also refer to other challenges such as the concentration of audiovisual products related to music on satellite TV channels, such as the U.S. MTV, and aesthetic norms for standardizing consumption under market regulations.

For these and similar reasons, the network of ALBA record companies created in Havana has great aspirations and high continental hopes for protecting musical creations in the interest of nations and their creators, and to really bring them closer to consumers.

Source:  www.cubanow.net