Popular Musicians of Buenos Aires and the Challenge of Global Copyright, 1920–50

This paper addresses the challenges posed by cultural globalization to popular artists in the first half of the 20th century, by analyzing the financial, legal, ideological, and esthetic strategies of the Argentine Society of Authors, Interpreters and Composers (SADAIC in Spanish) and raises some conceptual questions regarding the way recent literature has dealt with the relations between globalization and populism in the region.
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> Since the early 1900s, musicians worldwide faced the growing threats and opportunities of a global network of investments, technology, audiences, and musical currents of all origins and legitimacies. In Buenos Aires, a union of musical artists engaged those challenges by developing a strategy of copyright collection in foreign markets, and by grounding it on a specific and complex discourse of the popular, the national, and the artistic. This paper analyzes both the strategy and the rhetoric of SADAIC through primary and secondary sources, with the goal of discussing the global nature of musical nationalism and illuminating the relations among music, globalization, and populism in Latin America.