Tag: latam

Pop Star Pabllo Vittar Gives Voice to Brazil’s LGBTQ Community

January 23, 2019

On Saturday evening in early November, 10,000 Brazilians gathered at the Hopi Hari amusement park just outside São Paulo and held their lighters aloft. It was Pride Day, and the celebrants were there to see Pabllo Vittar, one of the country’s biggest pop stars and the most famous member of its LGBTQ+ community. Amidst cheers from her fans, whom she lovingly refers to as Vittarlovers, she commanded the stage, powering through her anti-bullying anthem “Indestrutível.” The song is a paean to resilience, a tribute to Vittar’s own well-known struggle against homophobic harassment as a teen.

Onstage at Hopi Hari, Vittar stood a regal six feet, one inch in flats, her long blonde hair slicked back behind her ears; she looked like a video game character who comes in peace, but will defend herself if the situation calls for it. “If I receive pain, I give you my love,” she sang to the audience, who mouthed every word. “And the more pain I get, the more I realize that I am indestructible.” The ballad concluded as Vittar raised her fist, leading her Vittarlovers in a familiar chant: “Eu resisto, Eu resisto.” I resist. I resist.

A Voice for Brazil’s LGBTQ Community

Vittar welcomes me with a hug. She is friendly and engaging—laughing easily and often. She is one week into the tour in support of her second LP and wants to talk about the positives.

“I feel great!” she says as we begin our conversation. “I feel full of energy. We have a whole new show, new album. It’s like I’m giving birth. I’m euphoric!”

Superstitious? Data Says These Are the Luckiest Songs for Football (Soccer) Fans

June 12, 2018

When countries play “the world’s game,” a.k.a. soccer or football, it takes a lot to win: skill, strategy, teamwork, and sometimes a bit of luck. The result of any hotly-contested, 90-minute match could depend on a millimeter of soccer cleat, a freak ricochet off a defender’s leg, and too many other variables to count.

Where does this kind of game-winning luck come from? Could music have anything to do with it?

We had some fun determining the luckiest song for fans in each of these soccer-loving countries. We used anonymous, aggregated data about what fans were listening to when their team won or lost previous games, as well as a few other factors. (If you’re interested in exactly how we created the actually-quite-rigorous “superstition score” that chose these songs, see the methodology below.)

Here are the songs that, according to our scientifically-derived superstition score, will help each of these 12 football-loving countries win their games.

If you’re looking for something lucky to play before your team’s next match, search no further.

Argentina: Soda Stereo – “Cuando Pase El Temblor”

Australia and Germany: Bag Raiders – Shooting Stars

*Oddly enough, Australia and Germany share the same lucky song!

Brazil: Matheus & Kauan — Decide Aí – Na Praia / Ao Vivo

Colombia: Cali Y El Dandee – Por Fin Te Encontré

France: Snoop Dogg – Young, Wild & Free (feat. Bruno Mars)

Japan: ONE OK ROCK – Clock Strikes

Mexico: Panteon Rococo – La Dosis Perfecta

Perú: Los Abuelos De La Nada – Mil Horas

Spain: Beret – Dime Quien Ama de Verdad

Sweden: Nause – Dynamite (feat. Pretty Sister)

England: The Killers – Mr. Brightside

Methodology

If you want to geek out about this, here’s where these songs came from. We ranked songs in each country by a superstition score consisting of a weighted mix of the following metrics, normalized where appropriate by each song’s share of streaming, to accommodate for normal variation of overall streaming levels there:

  • Win-to-loss score: the ratio between a song’s streams in the country on winning days vs. losing days
  • Match day score: the ratio between a song’s streams in the country on game days vs. other days
  • Country relevance score: the ratio between a song’s streams in the country vs. elsewhere — i.e. how unique it is to that country
  • Country rank score: the song’s highest rank in a country on match days

Did we have to apply such rigor to answer this question? Probably not, but we figured that the teams are working hard and playing hard, so we should too.