Gallery Studio: a musical showcase in Poblenou with international aspirations

Some evenings, as night falls, one can find themselves walking through Poblenou and encountering a shop window where a well-known artist has been enclosed. They are inside, at their leisure, singing their songs to an invisible audience, oblivious to what is happening outside. It doesn't matter if a fire truck or a curious dog passes by. There they are, as if they were a talking mannequin, but with rhythm. With this proposal, the musical startup Gallery Studio has created a local version of the Tiny Desks Concerts and has managed to attract voices like Amaia, Alizzz, Rigoberta Bandini, Morad, Julieta Venegas, Arón Piper, and María Becerra to its peculiar set. Their performances, somewhere between a music video and a live show, accumulate more than 50 million views and almost 200,000 subscribers on YouTube, the platform through which they distribute the videos.

This new musical format with a Barcelona stamp was born in November 2020, after COVID canceled leisure and any massive event. "The pandemic helped us consolidate the format because it was a time when there were no concerts, and Gallery sessions allow you to see an artist in a very real way and with few intermediaries; it almost seems like they are singing to you," explains Genís Pena, head of Gallery Studio.

The proposal was located in Acid House (Mies Van Der Rohe Award 2015), 500-square-meter offices on Àvila Street. There, the creative agency Folch and the audiovisual production company White Horse coexist. They were responsible for buying the space, where a circus company had previously rehearsed, and decided to renovate it with the help of the Barcelona studio Arquitectura-G to settle there. Currently, a team of about 50 employees works there. From the beginning, they left one of their rooms, with street views, empty, with the aim of filling it with art that could be contemplated by any passerby.

The premiere of Gallery Studio was with El encuentro by Alizzz and Amaia, presenting one of the first songs that the multifaceted artist from Castelldefels released from his first album, Tiene que haber algo más, one of the big surprises of the season. The seed of this musical session lies in the fact that White Horse had been talking to Amaia about making a music video, which didn't happen, but it translated into participating in the first recording in the Poblenou storefront. Thus, the original idea that White Horse and Folch had was also concretized, moving from art exhibition to music. "The song by Alizz and Amaia has worked very well and has become iconic, which served to give a strong initial push to the project," Pena remarks.

After El encuentro, other musical sessions have followed, always with very different profiles and accents, already reaching more than 40. "We want to represent the sound of now and, for that reason, we don't close ourselves off to any specific style. We have brought pop artists and others who are more urban or more classical. We alternate to create a radiography of what is happening musically," says their spokesperson. In addition to those mentioned above, Mala Rodríguez, Rojuu, Yung Beef, La Zowi, Trueno, Luna Ki, Duki, and Bizarrap have joined. Some former Operación Triunfo contestants have also passed through the Poblenou storefront. After Amaia, who repeated in a second session to present her latest album, Cuando no sé quién soy, Maria Escarmiento and Natalia Lacunza have visited Gallery Studio. The most viewed recording, with eight million reproductions, is that of the rapper from L'Hospitalet de Llobregat, Morad, with his Pensamientos.

With this long history, when concerts returned, Gallery sessions did not suffer. "We have been lucky enough to have consolidated ourselves as a new musical format. People already know it and want to see their favorite artist here. Even though normal activity has returned, people continue to consume content digitally," says Pena. "Today, the artist goes beyond their music, they need to generate a lot of content for fans to constantly consume, and we help them have a quality product in which they are shown very clearly," he adds. In fact, the only times they have had to cut the recording have been when a singer has uploaded a story of the shoot and their followers have found out they were at Acid House, flocking to see them in person and making the cameras' work difficult ---there is an exterior one to capture the coming and going of the street---.

Such is the success achieved that the startup has decided to launch its own record label and a new musical format, Room, designed for TikTok and Generation Z. In it, emerging singers lock themselves up again, but this time in their room. "We have recreated a room and simulate that the artist is there singing their song. It has to serve to discover new voices while you are on TikTok, suddenly appearing someone you don't know," Pena details.

The musical mapping that Gallery Studio does is not limited only to local artists and extends to America. "The Spanish and Latin markets are the ones that best understand the format," Pena emphasizes, with a young user profile, taking into account that they are the ones who consume YouTube the most, the main source of monetization for the company, as well as collaborations with brands such as Adidas, Bershka, and Amazon. Spain is the market that concentrates the most followers of Gallery sessions, followed by others such as Mexico, Argentina, Colombia, and Chile.

The startup does not rule out creating new showcases in which to enclose artists beyond Poblenou, with a focus on Latin America, but, according to Pena, they are waiting for the right moment and partners to do so. And it is that, for Pena, who had previously worked at the record label Primavera Labels, the Catalan capital has had a lot to do with the success of this new format. "Barcelona is a cultural and musical transit point, and the fact of showing iconography linked to the city has created a symbiosis. We feed on artists who are here and there have also been some who had to come to Gallery and the fact that it was in Barcelona has helped a lot," she defends.