With a packed programme of live performances, panel discussions and talks, São Paulo’s International Music Week looked firmly ahead to the future of the music industry, celebrating the hybrid sounds and rhythms of South America in the process.

Having an outlet to showcase and promote music beyond your ecosystem is a privilege not always afforded to those whose music exists in a less accessible geographical area. That makes SIM São Paulo such an essential event in the South American musical calendar and draws on the long-established models that contemporaries such as SXSW, ADE, and The Great Escape exemplify. This is a chance for a vast array of new music to have an industry platform, the opportunity to listen and learn from established players across the South American music industry and beyond, and the ability to connect. 

SIM São Paulo achieves this universality of connection in spades over four days of conference, panel, and gig, with the added ingredient being Brazilian enthusiasm, positivity, and colour wherever you turn. Situated at the Memorial da América Latina in the city’s vibrant and relentlessly musical Barra Funda area, the four-day event complex includes two ultra-modern auditoriums and a central outdoor stage.

What is most striking is the rich variation in attendees, who pool from a huge cross-section of genre and personnel, wholly representative of the vast array of people who inhabit a country whose musical imprint remains perhaps the most vital cog in South America’s musical export.