Trama Virtual

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

~ the last words ~

Trama was a São Paulo record label, started in 1998 by João Marcello Bôscoli and André Szajman, and in 2001 it opened a website where any Brazilian musician could make an account, upload a record and give it away. There was no contract and nothing to press. The label went on signing artists in the ordinary way alongside it, which meant the same company was running a filter and a wide open door at the same time.

It turned into a genuinely large archive. By the time it closed, the catalog held 205,512 tracks from 78,675 registered artists, an enormous number for one national scene, and for most of those artists it was the only public address their music had. Later on Trama added a paid layer where companies sponsoring Brazilian independent music covered a payment to the artist per download, so free for the listener stopped meaning free for the musician.

Bôscoli announced the end in March 2013 and was direct about the reason. The site went off on 31 March. He said the decision had nothing to do with money and that Trama Virtual had launched with an innovative character it no longer had, which was fair: by 2013 an unsigned Brazilian musician had Bandcamp and SoundCloud, and neither of those required a record label's goodwill to work.

~ the record ~

~ a label running a server ~

The strange part is who built it. In 2001 the record industry's position on free downloads was the Napster litigation, and here was a working label handing unlimited free hosting to unsigned acts, including thousands of acts it would never sign. Trama's own reasoning was promotional rather than charitable. A scene with more music in it has a bigger audience, and the label sat inside the scene it was enlarging.

~ the sponsored download ~

The payment scheme deserved more attention than it got outside Brazil. Instead of charging listeners, Trama sold the audience to brands that wanted to be associated with independent music and paid the artists out of that, per download. Half a dozen ad supported music services tried a version of the same arrangement later and did worse with it, and this one had been running in Portuguese since the middle of the 2000s, funded by a record label.

Bôscoli also made a point of saying nothing would be lost, because the site had only ever held copies and the masters stayed with the artists. Whether all 78,675 accounts still had their files somewhere in 2013 is a question nobody went back and checked.

~ from here ~

None of this reached me. Brazilian independent music in Portuguese was not going to travel to a Turkish desktop on its own in 2004, and the recommendation machinery that later made that kind of crossing routine had not been built yet. What I had in exactly those years was a folder of MP3s with broken ID3 tags collected from wherever they came from, which is the other half of the same decade.

The last archived page of tramavirtual.uol.com.br is from 2 April 2013, two days after the closing. By late May the address was returning a 503. Trama carried on as a label.

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