{"id":8763,"date":"2021-09-20T00:00:36","date_gmt":"2021-09-20T04:00:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/magazineampm.com\/?p=8763"},"modified":"2021-09-18T14:30:57","modified_gmt":"2021-09-18T18:30:57","slug":"sandunga-proyecto-en-construccion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/magazineampm.com\/en\/sandunga-proyecto-en-construccion\/","title":{"rendered":"Sandunga, project under construction"},"content":{"rendered":"

A few months ago I started a little discussion about music in streaming<\/em> \u2014or as it is said in our Spanish, broadcast live\u2014 in Cuba. I started from the hypothesis that access to the Internet via mobile data could change the forms of consumption of audiovisual products. I defended the comfort of listening to whatever you want whenever you want, and the pleasure of exploring playlist<\/em> public and share your own. I defended, above all, the vice generated by discovering new music and more new music and living like that, happily, in a loop ex profeso<\/em> of which even being aware I refuse to leave.<\/p>\n

I admit that I was stubbornly romantic, because at the moment the first filter that this type of consumption must pass to gain popularity on the Island is to calculate how many megabytes it deducts from the data package.<\/p>\n

One minute of audio in a maximum quality format \u2014which, by the way, It is measured by the amount of <\/a>kilobytes<\/a> transmitted in one second (kbps) and not so much because of the format<\/a>\u2014 around 2.5 megabytes of consumption. However, if we are subscribed to free accounts on platforms such as Spotify, we listen to low-quality music (at 24 kbps), which deducts 0.63 megabytes for every 3 minutes. A giga would be enough to play about 1,625 songs.<\/p>\n

But still, the streaming<\/em> in Cuba continues to be at a disadvantage in the face of the almost infinite benefits of the bots<\/em> on Telegram; especially because when downloading we can listen to the same song 10 times for the same cost\/mega consumption.<\/p>\n

With this panorama, an application like Sandunga has all the potential to popularize live music \u2014online\u2014 in the country.<\/p>\n

Sandunga is a national platform for streaming<\/em> \u2014a project of Artex SA and the export agency Soy Cubano\u2014, and contains exclusively Cuban music. It is his first distinction and his strength. First, because it can concentrate the rich universe that is our music and thereby exploit the sucking capacity that these platforms have. And, furthermore, because, unfortunately, a large part of the catalog of the country's record companies is not available in foreign and larger distributors such as Spotify, Apple Music or Pandora.<\/p>\n

However, what should be its strength is today its weakness. Months after its launch, on April 15, 2021, Sandunga's catalog only contains 2,907 songs and 135 videos (most of the latter are video clips, since other categories such as Making of and Concerts remain empty, or with just one video). material).<\/p>\n

The catalog is, above all, the database that structures and supports any of these online projects. The interaction of the user depends on it, on which the algorithms for the personalization of the service depend, the formula for the success of these platforms.<\/p>\n

The broader the catalog, the more likely it is to attract users and subscribers, which translates into a more profitable business model (always remember that these platforms and networks are or belong, in principle, to commercial companies).<\/p>\n

In general, those responsible for feeding the catalogs are the record companies themselves. In the case of Sandunga<\/a>, not only the Egrem, Colibr\u00ed, Bis Music and Abdala contribute, but also the Center for Research and Development of Cuban Music (Cidmuc), the music museum <\/a>and some artistic representation agencies. By the way, it would be a shame if the directors of the platform did not consider from now on how to provide services to other content providers, such as autonomous collective labels or independent artists, who today produce much of the sound material on the Island.<\/p>\n

The income \u2014which at the moment is generated only from subscriptions, and is distributed by the controversial pro rata system, as Spotify and other platforms do\u2014, in the first instance pay an 8% in case of streaming<\/em> and 10 % if the use is by downloading to the Cuban Agency for Musical Copyright (Acdam). The remaining sum is divided into 70% for content providers \u2014which in turn is broken down according to the number of listens or downloads per theme\u2014 and 30% for Soy Cubano, an Artex export agency specializing in the marketing and promotion of cultural products and services. Cubans.<\/p>\n

The functionalities according to the type of subscription are another of the success factors of the companies that offer services of streaming. <\/em>In Sandunga these functionalities are still very limited. For free registrations, for example, it does not allow playing music or video files for more than 40 seconds.<\/p>\n