Politics, artistry and technology converge at Primavera Pro

A side-project of the legendary Primavera Sound, the three day Barcelona-based event runs a tight ship of talks, live shows, and a lot of day drinking – all inside the auspices of the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona, one of the city’s best gallery spaces.

This year AI and Web3 are a predictably big presence across the event, with an kick-off session from Cherie Hu setting the tone. Hu's music-tech newsletter Water & Music centres on the impact of emerging trends across all parts of the music industry.

It's telling that Hu's opening gambit - asking the room for a show of hands if they own an NFT or want to launch a Web3 product - results in very little positive noise. The audience is largely here because, like many, the convergence of concepts around Web3 remains elusive.

Hu's talk touches on early experiments many artists have had with NFTs — which led to an eventual NFT goldrush (remember Grimes' Death of the Old, selling for almost $400,000 in March 2021?) and then a series of mass scale investor exits as NFTs shifted from an investment opportunity into a fan engagement tool for artists and brands.

Web3 is about a single, transparent source of truth for financial and data flows, explains Hu - a set of applications built upon the blockchain. Its decentralisation means both resilience and transparency. For the music industry in particular, it can offer global payments and revenue sharing among multiple collaborators, platform agnostic fan and content data, and a horizontal and participatory culture that blurs the lines among artists, fans and collaborators.

Artists can have a substantial role, Hu explains, in educating their audience on Web3, and in responding to the ways their fans want to interact. So what do fans actually want? The music itself, for starters, and the stories around it and the artist. Allowing fans to contribute both as patrons and teammates is key to this.

The Web3 discussion is picked up again later in the week - this time with a discussion about its revolutionising natures in music by some of the industry’s most evangelical rising stars – including Cooper Turley and Jacqui Bransky.

Prima Pro also excels in telling some of the most inspiring stories from the world of music and this year found its emotional centre in a conversation centred on the implications and benefits of resistance parties — where protest culture effectively creates a soundtrack for liberation. By bringing people together into a community, the dancefloor is an inherently political space.

So what does liberation sound like? Each member of the panel has played their own part in creating radical change in the world through dance music and events. The experiences of Naja Orashvili and Giorgi Kikonishvili — co-founders of Bassiani Club in Tblisi - were shaped by a country that was defeated in its last four wars and fell into total political and economic ruin. "There was literally no electricity in Georgia in the '90s," explained Kikonishvili, "and yet people were creating electronic music."

The dancefloors of Bassiani were created to be a political space precisely for the kind of people who were excluded from the dominant political culture and discourse. Bassaini has its own declared values — which include taking care of each other. "Especially in the times when there was a war with with a neigbhouring country, the dancefloor became even more important," explained Orashvili. "It's exactly when we should unite people from different countries and groups — this is how they become friends."

In the ten years of Bassiani, Orashvili recounted, there was never been a peaceful night and countless social movements in Georgia were born on the club's dancefloors. It's a headache for the government, she adds. "The system is frightened by us!"

Arab musician Wizzy — responsible for some of the most prominent queer events in Berlin, including Queens Against Borders — grew up in Syria and came to Berlin aged 17. Queens Against Borders is a showcase and performance, and includes music from across the world. Starting in small bars in 2016, it's now part of Berlin's Pride. The event also provides safety and shelter for trans and queer people.

"Life in Syria was hard as a person from the LGBTQ community," he explained, "and even harder as an artist because it wasn't the masculine sound of dance music that producers wanted." The journey from Syria to Germany changed Wizzy as a person and artist — it was there in "the city of opportunity" that he found the freedom to embrace his true self. "Music the best way to introduce people to your culture," Wizzy said.

As co-founder of Palestine Music Expo, Mahmood Jrere 's work celebrates and promotes Palestinian music around the world. It's a music inextricably informed by occupation, said Jrere. His challenge was how to bring the industry to Palestine, to see artists who wete grounded by their polticial circumstances. "I think some of the people who come are in shock," Jrere explained. "They go and see the occupation and the separation wall during the day, then at night they see the music.

"We want them to see how we are occupied during the day but at night we can party!"

Primavera Pro's central session this year continues its track record of bringing high profile figures from the seminal fringes - last year John Waters spoke to a packed room and this year it's the Mael brothers. Sparks remain a singular entity in pop culture — the quintessential favourites of your favourite artist (or actor, author etc). 2023 sees a new record for the band as well as chance for a whole new generation of fans to fall for their surreal, warm charm.

With a 26 album career - spanning more than half a century - behind them, the brothers Mael talked fondly about the beginnings and how their unique blueprint for pop music began.

"There has to be a certsin level of rechimg people with pop music," Ron explained, "and early on we had a certain sensibility that we didnt want to water down. We really try to adhere to not making compromises. When you do, it doesnt work commerically and you feel lost and it's just depressing."

"It wasnt only the music of bands like The Kinks we wanted to rip off but the style and attitude," added Ron. "We also believed in the detail of the lyrics - if it's a song ahout love or feeling sad you can address those in a way that's more oblique."

Todd Rundgren was among the first to appreciate the eccentricity of the Mael brothers and pivotal to their early success: "He heard us and saw that this is what pop music should be with all its eccentriticites,"explained Russell.

The artist is fundamentally at the centre of much of Primavera Pro's talks, with the spotlight on the bigger pieces of the career puzzle. Alongside a focus on mental health — looking at the policies in place at record companies and the adoption of working practices to ensure that artist welfare is a priority — the closing day of the event saw a panel exploring the different factors that need to come together for an artist to go global.

Fabian Batistela — the general director of the São Paulo International Music Week, held annually in the Brazilian city since 2013 — stressed the simple importance of knowing where you're going, and what the market is like there. "All countries are different. for me the most important thing is knowing the territory... Brasil is like a continent and it's very difficult to travel from the south to the north; it's actually easier to travel between countries in Europe than in Brasil. Every state has its own music, dialect, culture...Brasil is a lot of things and you meed to know where your project can fit: which city, region and scene."

You need a strong foundation in your own city and country, she also stressed: "Curators and promoters are looking for bands with a solid career at home first — it's a big argument for you to go abroad and it means you're ready to go abroad too."

Working with the likes of Nirvana, Nick Cave and Leonard Cohen across his long career, AEG's Elliot Lefko revealed the gulf in popularity for bands between Europe and North America: "Even for bands like Blur - we have no idea if they'll even tour their new record in the US."

For Ruby-Jean McCabe working with bands in Australia, money and distance is the issue. "You cant just drive to the next country like you can here in Europe. Being able to travel and go to different markets and cut through the noise is a challenge."

"Networking is key," explained Diana Glusberg from Niceto Club in Argentina. "It's amazing when I meet people from miles away who love music as much as you do - they're part of the same tribe but from another country.

"Open hearts are important too because music has the power to dis-alienate people."