Who’s Buying Cuban Phenom?

The debut album by Cuba’s Buena Vista Social Club, produced by Los Angeles-based guitarist Ry Cooder for World Circuit/Nonesuch Records, is the second best-selling Latin collection in the nation.

The 1997 album won a Grammy in 1998 and reached No. 1 on the U.S. Latin charts last year, but this newest surge in sales marks the first time it has broken onto the mainstream pop chart, where it’s now No. 97. Estimated U.S. sales to date: nearly 450,000.

Most attribute the increased sales to an acclaimed documentary about the group by German filmmaker Wim Wenders, playing on about 50 screens nationwide. The film also boosted sales of albums by two Buena Vista Social Club members: singer Ibrahim Ferrer and pianist Ruben Gonzalez. Both albums, also on World Circuit/Nonesuch, are now on Billboard’s Latin chart.

So why is it that at the Aguila de Hierro Discoteca record store on 7th Street in Los Angeles, no one has heard of the Buena Vista Social Club--not even the shop’s manager? At dozens of Latin record stores in New York, Chicago, Boston and Miami, it is the same story.

Latinos, it seems, have not put the Buena Vista Social Club on the Latin charts.

So who has?

According to Monica Ricardez, Latin music buyer for the Tower Records chain in the Los Angeles area, the typical Buena Vista Social Club consumer is a Caucasian between 35 and 55 who has heard about the album through the Wenders documentary, public radio or newspapers. This assessment was echoed by several other retail specialists.

The success of the three World Circuit/Nonesuch Cuban projects marks the first time so many world music titles have appeared simultaneously on the Latin charts, according to Geoff Mayfield, director of charts for Billboard magazine.

It may be that the mass U.S. Latino audience just wouldn’t care about the album, a collection of antique Cuban folk music recorded by a geriatric group of Cuban musicians. After all, the son style has been out of date for 50 years, and the average age of a Latino in the U.S. is 26. There are no commercial Latin radio stations in the nation that would play it.

Possibly with this in mind, World Circuit/Nonesuch’s marketing strategy for the album focused on a world music consumer base rather than a Latin one--a move some have called brilliant, but that others have said may have missed a chance to capitalize on the rapidly expanding Latin music market.

According to World Circuit/Nonesuch, the U.S. marketing efforts for the Buena Vista Social Club album were concentrated in established world music channels, an area where Cooder had a proven track record.

These included college and public radio stations, newspapers, magazines and television news broadcasts, including a recent special on the group done by ABC’s “Nightline.”

Though the Buena Vista Social Club album won a Grammy in the Latin/tropical category, it was promoted very little through domestic Spanish- and English-language Latin media outlets.

So even as Rolling Stone magazine declares a Cuban Music Invasion, few Latinos are aware of any such thing.

Even though World Circuit/Nonesuch is a sister label of WEA Latina, one of the top Latin music labels in the world, WEA Latina was not approached to help with the marketing of the Buena Vista Social Club project, according to national sales manager Jose Godur.

World Circuit/Nonesuch officials have not returned phone calls about their marketing strategy, but in an e-mail to The Times, marketing director Peter Clancy said the label hired a single outside consultant to do promotions in “the Hispanic market.”

The consultant was in charge of translating press materials, distributing them and making all follow-up phone calls.

Anecdotal evidence indicates that few local Latin media outlets were reached by World Circuit/Nonesuch about the Cooder project.

Lupe de la Cruz, marketing director for EMI Latin, says World Circuit/Nonesuch probably “missed an opportunity to expand its fan base” by assuming the Latinos who would enjoy the album would be reached through the world music outlets.

The same mistake wasn’t made by the Higher Octave label, which recently released a solo album by another Buena Vista Social Club member, guitarist Eliades Ochoa. Higher Octave enlisted De la Cruz and EMI Latin to aid it in marketing the album to Latinos; both labels are owned by Virgin.

“All of our research indicates that the Latinos who are buying the Buena Vista Social Club are second and third generation,” or young people, De la Cruz says.

While World Circuit/Nonesuch’s approach likely reached many educated, middle-class Latinos, many of whom have bought the album, De la Cruz says it is possible many more Latinos of diverse economic backgrounds could have been reached through magazines such as People en Espanol.

He also says there is another possible Latino audience for old-style son and bolero that has emerged in recent years: teen girls.

Pointing to the commercial Latin success of young men performing in older styles--including Charlie Zaa and Los Tri-O--De la Cruz wonders if they wouldn’t buy Buena Vista Social Club as well, if properly marketed to them.

Tower’s Ricardez also believes there could have been an expanded Latino market for the Cooder projects. But, she says, in order to sell effectively to Latinos, the label would have to do away with the suggestion that Cooder had somehow discovered a lost music.

“[World Circuit/Nonesuch] presents it as if they’re ‘discovering’ the son,” Ricardez says. “Son has always been known throughout the Latin community, so there’s some suspicion there.”

On the same point, Presitigio Records President Bill Marin says the non-Latin media have lost credibility with many Latinos by reporting that Cooder had rediscovered a forgotten music from an exotic land.

“In general, there’s an over-hype of Cuban music selling to the masses in this country,” Marin says. His claim is supported by the fact that in the past two years, close to 1,000 articles have been written in the mainstream press about Cooder’s project alone.

Says Marin: “There’s a wide range of tropical music in this country that gets ignored by the media. The Buena Vista Social Club turned out to be a music critic’s dream come true, and everyone said there was this Cuban music explosion. But when you look at the percentage of all tropical sales that actually come out of Cuba, you’re talking about maybe five records out of hundreds. It’s really pretty insignificant.”

To sell an album such as Buena Vista Social Club to a mainstream Latino audience, a label probably would be wise to portray it as familiar, not exotic and mysterious, says Guy Garcia, a novelist and journalist who writes often about Latin culture in the U.S.

“Imagine Europe going nuts over Hank Williams all of a sudden,” Garcia says. That, he says, is what the Buena Vista Social Club mania may look like to many Latinos. To sell Hank Williams to country fans as something exotic and new would seem, well, silly.

There’s a lesson here somewhere for cultural reporters and for record company executives, says Billboard’s Mayfield.

Before making assumptions about who is buying what in a rapidly changing pop world where Latin music is suddenly the golden goose, people should look closely at who buys what, and for what reason.

“It wouldn’t really take much to sell these [Cuban] records to Latins,” Mayfield says, adding that it wouldn’t take much to sell a popular Latin artist like Charlie Zaa to world music fans either. “I think it’s just amazing that they haven’t figured that out yet.”