CliqueMusic

» see cliquemusic.com.br as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

There is a line across the top of cliquemusic.com.br, and it has been there for most of my adult life: "Este site foi arquivado apenas para propósito de referência histórica, e não é atualizado desde 2002." This site has been archived for historical reference only, and has not been updated since 2002. Underneath it the portal loads exactly as it did, album covers and artist photographs and an alphabet you can browse. The search box no longer works. The indexes still do.

It launched on 18 May 2000, made by three Brazilian journalists. Vicente Tardin and Diter Stein built it with Felipe Vaz, and the editorial side was led by Tárik de Souza, who was already one of the most established music critics in the country. The money was a million US dollars, put up by Marcos Montenegro of Ibope with JCS Business Partners, which in 2000 was a serious bet on a website about a national music tradition.

What they were trying to make was not a magazine but a reference work: biographies, discographies, essays, reviews of new releases, a streaming section called CliqueRadio where the founders and invited artists picked what played, and a store attached. There was an English-language sibling at allbrazilianmusic.com for readers who did not have Portuguese. The pitch, from the editor Silvio Essinger, was that you would come to read about Brazilian music in real time and listen to it while you did.

In 2000 I was sixteen, online at home in Turkey on a dial-up modem, and the promise of twenty eight thousand audio clips was addressed at a connection nobody around me had. My music arrived a couple of years later, a few files at a time, off internet cafe machines in the afternoon. That is the honest distance here, and it is a bandwidth distance rather than a taste one. A site built on the assumption that you could stream from a database was aimed at a country that had already got broadband, and Brazil in 2000 mostly had not either, which may be most of the story.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what was in it ~

The scale is the argument for remembering it. Twenty eight thousand audio clips, five thousand catalogued albums, seven hundred biographies, sorted across thirty seven genres, with 2,360 artists registered by March 2002. That was assembled in under two years, by hand, before anybody had a Wikipedia to lean on or a music API to query.

The names behind it are why the entries hold up. Working newspaper critics wrote for the site, including Carlos Calado from Folha de S. Paulo and Silvio Essinger out of the Jornal do Brasil, and the research was backed by historians of Brazilian popular music, José Ramos Tinhorão among them. In August 2001 Marco Antonio Barbosa took over as editor. This was not aggregated copy. It was written by the people who wrote the books.

~ still being served ~

Twenty four years after the last update, somebody is still paying to keep it up. The pages answer, the images load, and the English sibling at allbrazilianmusic.com answers too. Nobody appears to have redesigned it or parked it on ads. It has just been left standing, with a note explaining what it is.

The logo makes the point better than I can. It is a yellow circle with a red heart drawn inside it, set next to the wordmark, and under the wordmark a tagline in the present tense: A música brasileira está aqui. Brazilian music is here. It has been here since 2002, in a browser that has changed four times, on a web that stopped visiting.

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