Flamenco-world.com
celebrates its tenth anniversary with the launch of a
record company for young talents
The company premieres with the album ‘Barcas
de plata’ by cantaora Encarna Anillo, produced by
Miguel Poveda, and ‘Viento del Norte’ by guitarist
Jesús Torres
The website now receives over 700,000
unique visits and serves nearly 4,000,000 pages
Flamenco-world.com, November 2007
The Spanish website Flamenco-world.com
turns 10 years old. And it does so as the leader of flamenco
on the Internet, where it was a pioneer project, as one
of the most veteran Spanish websites and as one of the
pages of reference on European culture. Every month it
receives over 700,000 unique visits and serves nearly
4,000,000 pages, above all, to Spanish, North American,
European and Asian readers. The website’s success
in the last decade endorses a new project, the record
label Flamenco World Music. The company premieres with
the albums ‘Barcas de plata’ by cantaora Encarna
Anillo - produced by Miguel Poveda - and ‘Viento
del Norte’ by guitarist Jesús
Torres.
In 1997, when the Internet was barely
beginning to crawl in Spain, two young Madrilenian entrepreneurs
conceived Flamenco-world.com. After 10 years of existence,
growing exponentially year after year, it has managed
to demonstrate that Spanish e-commerce is also competitive.
The website, which is updated daily in Spanish and English,
celebrates its first decade of life by revalidating its
record of international propagation.
Flamenco-world.com's store.
Calle Huertas 62. Madrid
It currently receives over 700,000 unique
visits and serves nearly 4,000,000 pages every month,
which situates it as the undisputed leader of flamenco
on the Internet and as one of the pages of reference on
European culture. Spain, North America, Europe and Asia
are its main markets, although it has readers and customers
all over the globe, including places as remote as Alaska,
Antarctica and the Virgin Islands. In total, some 85,000
people subscribe to the ‘Cyberpeña’
worldwide, between enthusiasts, artists, educational centers,
promoters, cultural institutions and media professionals.
Not in vain does the Ministry of Education recommend Flamenco-world.com
as an educational resource for teachers of Spanish as
a foreign language; and the New York Public Library has
nourished its collection with material served by the website.
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Encarna Anillo (Photo
Daniel Muñoz) |
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Daniel Muñoz and Lydia Nieto,
Flamenco-world.com’s founding partners, explain
that “it’s possible to get away from the homogeneity
of the cultural industry of the masses, by means of generating
quality contents and services for a universal minority
scattered all over the world”. To do so, they created
a concept, based on hyper-specialization, which is a paradigm
today for many other companies on the Net: integrating
a magazine and online store. The magazine, with identical
versions in Spanish and English, has offered free consultation
from the beginning and provides access to archives with
thousands of news items, interviews, reports and reviews
carried out by a team of professional journalists. It
is complemented with multimedia contents, also with free
access, such as photographs, videos and constantly updated
databases. The online store catalogue lists over four
thousand products, including records, DVDs, instruments,
clothing, merchandising and accessories for the practice
and study of flamenco. All of these products have also
been commercialized since 2005 at the physical store located
in the heart of Barrio de Las Letras in Madrid. In time,
the project has branched out, becoming a platform for
services related to flamenco which consists of other activities
like management, promotion and consulting.
New project: the record company
Flamenco World Music
The tenth anniversary drives forward
new projects by Flamenco-world.com. The website is launching
its record label, Flamenco World Music, with the aim of
“helping young talents in flamenco to make known
their artistic proposals, covering an area which the large
record companies are neglecting”, Muñoz and
Nieto explain.
The company is going to premiere with
the albums ‘Barcas de plata’ by Encarna
Anillo and ‘Viento del Norte’ by Jesús
Torres. The début album by the Cádiz-born
cantaora, who has been collaborating with Carmen Linares
in the last season, is produced by Miguel Poveda. The
album by guitarist Jesús Torres is also the first
in an extensive career as an artist in which his work
stands out with Antonio Gades, Mario Maya and Isabel Bayón.
The philosophy of the record company,
which is scheduled to release five titles in 2008, is
“the launch of a catalogue specializing in flamenco
which lays stakes on quality and artistic freedom, and
that makes records which will last available to the international
public”.
Jesús Torres (Photo
Daniel Muñoz)
