At the presentation press conference, as well as the beautiful Arcuri and Belvedere and the lively Ventura, the interventions of Piepoli, director of the Cirm, which will manage the public opinion jury, and Alberto Pojaghi and Franco Bixio, respectively chairmen of Afi and Fimi (the Italian Manufacturer's Association for albums). It is true that they are the main dish, the music moguls, representing more than 50 companies, independent and multinational labels, who produce albums in Italy and for whom Sanremo is the most important market showcase of the year.

As we know well, in the past few years the crisis of sales, owed to the ever more popular use of digital cd burners and CDRs ( it is absolutely illegal to burn and play the music to an audience) has put the sector in deep crisis which has seen many jobs lost and service companies close. The reason must also be found in the high cost of the phonographic support, the content of which is often not worth paying for, but especially in the poverty of ideas of the A&R (Artistic Direction) offices who, following trends and fashions, give rise to a "DISPOSABLE" market, which no longer cultivates talents but burns artists and billions in a mannerist pantomime that has nothing to do with art.

Thus Sanremo becomes ever more important in discographers' expectations, also because it is the only media event that the Companies can try to manage, ensuring a promotion on the National territory which often, however, does not respond to these expectations. On the contrary it is safe to say that sales charts practically never correspond to the Festival's results, but they more often than not reward the artists who take their work on the territory, organising tours and live concerts. This is proving audiences' growth and coming of age, which wants to be impressed, rather than by squalid exercises in musical rhetoric, by the feeling that the artist can transmit in the "live" events, devoid of the filter given by the lights or the cameras.

Sanremo therefore remains an event tied more into Italian tradition than the situation of world music, also because abroad it is spoken little of, or not at all, a moment in which all gather and criticise or approve of something, a typical "square" gathering Italian style where everyone, for at least a week a year, feels spectator and  protagonists at the same time in a merry go round of notes, words and colours which, from one pizza to the next, carries us onto spring. 

March.2002

The Festival on Rai 1
Sanremo