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Sony Music Spain’s Latin Grammy Nominees Are Leaving for Las Vegas

From current sensation Rosalía to Rozalén and rock group Vetusta Morla, the presence of nominees from the label is a sign of Spanish artists growing impact in the Int'l Latin market

Rosalía’s nominations in five categories of the 2018 Latin Grammys not only confirmed her spectacular arrival on the international scene in advance of the release of her new album El Mal Querer, which debuts at No. 2 on the Latin Albums chart this week. The Barcelona flamenco-pop singer’s showing is also indicative of the strong presence of artists on her label Sony Music Spain among Latin Grammy nominees, and, this week, at the Latin Grammys in Las Vegas, where the Sony Spain contingent will be hard to ignore.

“We have about 70 people traveling,” Jose María Barbat, Sony Music’s President for Spain and Portugal, tells Billboard.

In addition to Rosalía and her entourage, the contingent includes Rozalén, a singer-songwriter from Madrid who has topped Spain’s charts but has yet to perform in the U.S. — she is up for awards in both the song of year and album of the year categories.

“I was not so surprised that Rozalén was nominated, but that she was nominated in the major categories,” comments Barbat. “Think of how many albums have been produced in Latin America this year. The fact that she made the short list [for album and song of the year] is very important.”

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Rosalía is also competing for song of the year, as well as for record of the year, for “Malamente.” The Sony Spain nominees also include Vetusta Morla, Spain’s leading rock band, which has only sold only negligible copies of its five albums in the U.S., and Tote King, a hip-hop artist from Seville.

Barbat says that the nominations represent an initiative by Sony Spain that marked a turnaround from the company’s previous relationship to the Latin Grammys (or lack of one.)

“In the past, the Latin Grammys were seen as `a Latin thing,” explains Barbat. “Artists who wanted to go to the Latin Grammys would have to pay for it themselves. I myself would have told you ‘it’s not my cup of tea.'”

Barbat pinpoints his own enlightenment about the importance of the Latin Grammys for the company’s artists when he attended for the first time in 2014, the year singer-songwriter Joan Manuel Serrat was celebrated as the Latin Grammy Person of the Year.

Since then, he stresses, the Latin Grammys have been recognized by Sony Spain as an important promotional opportunity for its artists, and the label is supporting them with publicity campaigns “before the nominations, after the nominations and during Latin Grammy week.

“This is the year that we can say it paid off,” he adds.

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Barbat, who became president of the label’s Ibero- American division last year and has been with the company for over a decade, lays out several factors that led to an overall shift in the label’s strategy for Spanish artists starting over the past decade. That change was sparked by Spain’s economic crisis (2008-2014) and a recorded music industry that crashed in 2002 and had its worst year in 2013, before streaming forged the path to a comeback; as well as the reality of the country’s changing demographics.

“The Spanish market is an aging market,” says Barbat, who met with Billboard in a Barcelona hotel bar to talk about the awards before leaving for Las Vegas. “The average age of the population is very high, the demographic curve hits in the European average, which is much higher than Latin America.” That aging listening public reflects the notable absence of young Spaniards who have left Spain for work opportunities in other countries, Barbat notes.

“We are in a shrinking market. In a business that is marching definitively toward digital – and digital by definition skews young – we really had no choice but to not put our energy into Spain alone,” he says. “So that was a vision: we need artists [whose music] can be consumed at least in Latin America. We started to focus our artistic vision on artists who could travel, whose music could be relevant in Latin America.”

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Spanish music’s push toward other markets has also been propelled by the artists themselves.

“For many years in Spain it was like in Brazil: they had a very strong home market, that allowed them to tour practically the entire year and with very good physical sales,” Barbat says. “It was a market that allowed you, if you were doing well, to make a lot of money and not travel abroad. But the crisis, and right before it – 10 or 11 years ago, the market became one that was not so interesting. An artist doing 100 concerts a year could do only 30. And there were a lot of places in Spain where concerts were sponsored by the local government – now you have to live from the ticket sales. And on top of that, less people started going to the shows.

“So, a lot of artists saw their incomes going down, and they said, hey, we need to go to Argentina, we need to go to Mexico; I want to go to the United States, I want to go abroad.”

In the past, some Spanish artists, notably Alejandro Sanz, and decades before him Julio Iglesias – made Miami the base for careers that successfully courted success in Latin America. They essentially became, as Barbat puts it, “Latin artists 100 percent,” shedding their identities as Spanish artists, at least as far as audiences outside of Spain were concerned. The executive credits the Sony-signed group La Oreja de Van Gogh, which had huge success in Latin America in the early and mid-aughts while still living in Spain, as setting a precedent for other artists.

“Now they don’t have to move to Miami,” he says. “I don’t think so. They don’t have to choose between going to Miami and being a Latin artist, and staying here and being a Spanish artist. “

For Barbat, the reason why artists from Spain have made such a strong showing in the Latin Grammy nominations this year is an artistic one.

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He calls music by these artists “a natural response to Latin urban music…They show that there is an option to do things differently.

“There is the Latin scene that right now is dominated by urban tropical music,” Barbat adds. “But then there is the world of Rosalía, Rozalén, Vetusta Morla, artists with a clearly Spanish identity, or including a European identity, and with influences from the non-Latino U.S.

“That’s appreciated by people in the Academy, who are people who have a wider vision of the industry and the artistic community.”

Those people include Latin Recording Academy President Gabriel Abaroa, who Barbat says has made several trips to Spain to encourage Spanish labels’ involvement in the Latin Grammys. According to Barbat, the Latin Grammy head was concerned that the flamenco category had deteriorated, and could even have disappeared because of a lack of enthusiasm about the awards in Spain.

“The first year I went to the Latin Grammys because my boss told me you have to go, Serrat is the man of the year, and he is from Spain. You have to be there,” he recalls. “When I got there, I understood. I realized this is a community and you have to be there. Doing it from Spain we are not going to gain anything. “