“Why Portugal” wants to have Portuguese music featured there every year

The Why Portugal platform, which has insisted on the internationalization of Portuguese music, wants to have an annual highlight of national artists in a foreign country, said one of the directors, Nuno Saraiva.

“We want to have a country focus mission every year where Portugal is featured in a certain country. We have not yet closed 2019. We are sure to continue our annual participation in the Eurosonic [Netherlands]. We will surely make a showcase at the Reeperbahn Festival [Germany] and we will develop in SIM – International Music Week of São Paulo [Brazil], “he explained.

The Why Portugal platform, created in 2016 to facilitate and accelerate the participation of Portuguese artists in international events, will be present this week in the first edition of the Waves Vienna Festival, which starts on Thursday in Austria and is dedicated to Portuguese music and Slovak.

In this festival, of showcases and conferences directed mainly to the agents of the sector, as producers, musicians, publishers and divulgadores, will go to work this week ten Portuguese artists and bands: Grandfather’s House, Holy Nothing, Mister Teaser, noiserv: papercutz, Rodrigo Leão, Surma, The Miami Flu, Vaarwell and We Bless This Mess.

“It is probably the largest number of Portuguese artists who have ever been in Austria, but also from the international conference we will have several Portuguese speakers present the reality of our market in this exchange logic,” said Nuno Saraiva.

Rui Miguel Abreu (Rimas e Batidas), Miguel Carretas (Audiogest), António Cunha (UGURU), Pedro Nascimento (Turbina), Pedro Oliveira (Fundação GDA), Luís Soares (Rock in Rio), Hugo Ferreira (Omnichord Records) Rocha, João Santos (Lusitanian Publishing), Sérgio Silva (Sincronia dos Sons) and Pedro Valente (Azáfama) will also be present in Austria.

The Portuguese presence at Waves Vienna comes one year after Portugal was in focus at the Eurosonic festival in the Netherlands and after Austria was the highlight of the recent edition of the Westway Lab, held recently in Guimarães.

“All our missions have had immediate results,” said Nuno Saraiva, noting that there are artists who participated in the Eurosonic in 2017 who are being invited to tour and play in other countries as a result of the mission in Holland.

Nuno Saraiva considered that “the European market continues to be the main stage of the internationalization of Portuguese music”, but it does not want to neglect two other important markets: North America and Latin America.

“North America is hard to ‘stick’ to, Mexico and Brazil have grown immensely digital, but they remain very difficult markets to ‘stick’ to, and much more funding is needed than we currently have. that other mechanisms may come to help us in this mission, “he said.

Currently the Why Portugal platform has served as an international promotion bridge for some Portuguese artists, in a strategy supported by entities such as the GDA Foundation, the General Directorate of Arts and AICEP – the Portuguese Agency for Investment and Foreign Trade.