Revival of vinyl records in Brazil spares a 77-year-old singer – and others – from oblivion

abcnews.go.com:

It took almost a half century for Brazilian singer Cátia de França to find her audience, but she finally has — with the help of a near-obsolete audio technology

SAO PAULO — It took almost a half century for Brazilian singer Cátia de França to find her audience, but she finally has — with the help of a near-obsolete audio technology.

Born in Paraíba, a state in Brazil’s poor northeast region, 77-year-old de França’s blend of psychedelic rock with traditional rhythms and modernist poetry long went overlooked, even as she toured the nation in the 1970s and '80s.

During the pandemic, she retreated to a conservation area in the mountains above Rio de Janeiro, “where you can’t even imagine an internet signal,” she told The Associated Press.

Then one day in 2021 her phone rang. It was the co-founder of an independent label in Sao Paulo who wanted to reissue her 1979 debut album, “20 Palavras ao Redor do Sol" (20 Words Around the Sun), on vinyl.

“I thought, ‘This must be a prank,’” de França recalled. “He started talking to me, and I realized it wasn’t.”

De França has since been thrust into the limelight, with fans and concerts in the alternative circuit.

Her belated fame largely reflects a revival taking place in Brazil, where last year vinyl records outsold CDs and DVDs for the first time in decades. Revenue doubled to 11 million reais ($2.2 million) in 2023 from the prior year, and was more than 15 times higher than in 2019, according to Pro-Musica, an association of Brazil’s largest record companies. And those figures include only new releases, as second-hand sales are almost impossible to track.

The market for used LPs never fully died, and now is on the upswing, said Carlos Savalla, a 66-year-old music producer in Rio