Marcelo Tas talks to Ivan Lins on the Provoca program, on Tuesday, April 30, at 10pm, on TV Cultura. The singer and songwriter talks about the difficulty in making money from streaming and how this led him to depression; he talks about the teacher who got scared watching him play and about the invitation he received to participate in Michael Jackson’s album, Thriller.
“On Spotify, you have around 900 thousand monthly listeners. What does this mean to you?” asks Tas.
Marcelo Tass and Ivan Lins @ Anna Coutinho
“It means I have 900,000 people who like my music. If I were selling CDs, when I was selling CDs, I could easily, with these 900,000 people, sell at least another 80,000 copies of CDs and survive on that, be paid fairly (…) to earn R$1, 00, I think it has to be played about 20 thousand times a month”, says the singer.
“It doesn’t seem very fair to me”, says Tas, who asks how this prose continues: “I went back to therapy to cure, now, another depression, because I lost my pension, I can’t reduce my work anymore, I have to work more than ever , because now the only source of income I have is the stage, putting on shows (…) The copyright is very low, it’s not enough for me to be able to, at least, maintain the life I built through my work”, he says the artist.
At another point in the program, Lins says that he started studying in 1972, when he was already famous. “The first attempt was on the piano, with a teacher who taught everything, she wasn’t just a piano teacher, she was a harmony teacher, music theory (…) this woman was the one who saved my life (..) I got there and she said ‘ Great, let’s study the piano, play it’. I started playing and she screamed (…) do you know about vampires when they get the sun on their face? (…) because my technique was all wrong, I taught myself how to play (…) she said: ‘I’m going to stay away, because what I hear is beautiful, but what I see is terrifying’”.
“Are you the type who likes to play old music or does it bother you?” asks Tas. “No, I love it. This is a lot about personality (…) I was always afraid of being alone (…) I spent my entire youth working in groups and all the good things I managed to do, I shared with my friends (…) then when I started a career and I see that the public asks me to sing, I realize that I am not alone. For me this is powerful, it is complicity. I play with joy and pleasure, as if I were playing for the first time (…) I love my things, I have self-esteem with my music, I listen to my music every day (…) and learn from them to rediscover feelings” , says the singer.