The trajectory of ¡Como No! has seen the company become one of the most important names in the U.K. live scene. One of their best qualities is being active in venues from small clubs to huge concert halls.

“We still promote across all kinds of scales as any music promoter does in any kind of business. It’s the same with mainstream rock and pop promoters like SJM because this is the way in which you get to work with any artists, being with them on the way up. Later today, I will go to look at this venue near the Bassey Building [in Peckham] which can only hold 80 people, but I do this because I like to promote in this area, it has a community feeling”.

Despite ¡Como No! being born and bred in London it has rapidly expanded its range all over the U.K. So we wondered, what are the differences between organising events in London and in other British cities?

“I usually say to artists that whatever audience they can get in London, they can get 10% outside. We have La Linea tour with Criolo and we hope to fill Koko with more than 1000 people. But outside of London, we’ll be reasonably happy if we can get 200 people in each venue. What we’re always saying to artists is that it’s very different to play outside London: there are fundamental and structural differences. The fundamental ones are about the size of London compared to other cities, London is such a hub and a magnet.

But then, you have to get down to other differences. Traditionally, in France and Germany, there are very strong regional cultural hubs, which are very well supported. Then, in Spain and Italy, there’s the civic and regional pride for small towns to have local or regional festivals during summer. While, regionally in the U.K. it is tough. Five or ten years ago we were regularly working with the MBM venues, which can have 1500 or 2000 people capacity. They are the regional concert halls like the Symphony Hall in Birmingham or Bridgewater Hall in Manchester. They were able to find audiences in those venues, but they also received subsidies, which could allow them to be happy if only the 50/60% of the venue was filled. Now, they don’t have those subsidies anymore and the audiences are smaller, so they struggle. It is a problem which doesn’t only affect world music, but music at large.

On the one hand, it is much easier to access to music than before, but on the other hand people don’t become fan of single artists in the same way. If you hardly listen to a full track on Spotify or watch a video on YouTube, then how can you spend money to be in one room with one artist for an entire evening? That’s part of the success of festivals, because they mirror the way that people consume music”.

With the events promoted by ¡Como No! having a distinct Latin and South American flavour, we wondered whether the relationship between British audiences and Latin music has changed over the past 30 years?

“I think it’s come and gone and changed a bit. For example, the late ‘90s represented a Latin boom in the pop scene with Ricky Martin and quickly became trendy in a way that it isn’t now. Whereas if we think about the cumbia and electronic cumbia scene, it is something that we’ve been talking about for a decade but has never happened. There’s this thing that we have laughingly called ‘The London Cumbia Coordinating Committee’ with people who are interested in promoting the scene from labels, promoters, managers…So, we sat down, but it never really happened.

Still, every year we get something coming through and maybe something more is happening with it in mainland Europe. Maybe it is a specific thing in one country, as it happened with La Yegros in France. They had this big hit with ‘Viene de Mi’, which seemed to crossover into the rock and pop scene. There are things that happen in mainland Europe which don’t work here though. One example is what happened with Manu Chao and the mestizo thing coming from Barcelona, that didn’t really work here.

In some ways, my inclination has always been to find a wider audience instead of focusing on something that only relates to the community, because we’re not part of that community. There are certain shows when the Latin American audience is more than half and that’s what possibly makes things more sustainable for us. With the Carlos Vives show, which has now sold out with almost 5000 tickets, I think it will be a 99.9% Latin audience because he has never released a record in the U.K. and has never appeared in the U.K. media. That could happen because the Latin community in London seems more established and has deeper roots. There’s also more Latin media and servicing that community is part of what we do, and maybe will become even more what we’ll do”.

Since the early 2000s La Linea Festival has been a direct reflection of this philosophy; trying to reach a wider audience through the different faces of Latin music, but never forgetting the South American communities of London.

“The first festival happened in 2001, but I had been thinking about it for a couple of years before that. The issue wasn’t that we couldn’t find audiences for some artists, we just needed an advert in Time Out and that was it, but what we couldn’t do was to introduce new artists on a smaller scale: to build a critical mass and create a brand that people could trust for new Latin music.

The idea was that people would be able to trust us and come and see those artists. To a large degree, it worked, particularly in the early years before the crash of 2008. Back then, people were still buying records and attending shows so we were able to do début shows with musicians like Seu Jorge or Gotan Project. Both artists made their U.K. debut during La Linea at the Royal Festival Hall, which was also where La Linea started with four shows a year. Pretty much all of them sold out and it was possible to launch artists on that level. I often think that, with artists like Seu Jorge, it’d have been easy and that his trajectory would have been different. It was probably the same with Gotan Project, which could have come in much smaller. One of the things that has changed is that artists don’t have those two income streams now, so they need to earn money from their live shows”.

Few days ago, La Linea 2016 got underway at Oval Space, with an intriguing double bill of Ariwo and A Guy Called Gerald: two acts which represent two distant ways to approach Latin American music. In light of this, we asked Andy how much La Linea has changed during its life.

“This year’s edition is quite heterogeneous. This is related to the development of world music, because in the beginning, when nobody really knew any of the artists it was about where was the artist was from. But now, with La Linea, we don’t sell somebody on their nationality, because we are no longer selling the exotic.

Back in the day, one of the first things we set up was a weekend called Colores de Colombia curated by Toto La Momposina. We brought over ten different bands from Colombia and we had an entire weekend focused on Colombia at the Barbican centre with different stages and a number of different shows. Then we did a Cuban Festival called Cuba Presente with music, visual arts and film. After that we did an Argentinian and Mexican Festival, but today, it’s all about the artists.

With La Linea we sell tickets to single shows, so we have to persuade the audience to buy the ticket to single events and promote them at our best. We never proposed a general pass because there’s not a huge level of crossover between the shows. People might buy tickets for more than one show, but they hardly crossover between traditions or styles”.

We have spoken about the past, but what is the future holding for ¡Como No! and La Linea? What is going to happen in the next few years to these two projects?

“It’s hard to think far ahead, particularly with La Linea. We are still a relatively small player and we are responding to the bigger changes in how people consume music. I suppose that one of the interesting things is that there’s been a few more crossovers, in particular when it comes to African artists. An example is the African Express project. I think that some doors are opening up for African artists and it would be good to find a way to do something similar for South Americans.

If the South American community continues to grow in the U.K., we aim to do more shows within that particular community like Carlos Vives. It will be interesting to see what will happen with the Mexrrissey project, how it will grow and develop. The ultimate postmodern event will be for Morrissey to form a Mexrrissey tribute band. So, I mean, I’m wondering when there’ll be a Mexrrissey tribute band, just to move further down the line.

Every year with La Linea is a bit of struggle because there is no subsidy involved, we just get some support from the Arts Council and I hope that we can continue to have that relationship with them. There was a time, years ago, when the Latin American economies were really growing like in Brazil, Mexico and Colombia, but everything is linked to the oil price, including if these countries have the abilities to invest and support their artists. What these governments are interested in, not to be too reductive, is music as a commodity, business and cultural export”.

So does everything inevitably go back to the feasibility of live music events in the London and U.K. world music scenes?

“One of the things that is difficult to do is tip acts, like Seu Jorge and Gotan Project, into the level of being financially sustainable in terms of performing in the U.K. That happens partly because they don’t have the income stream from records anymore, but also how do you reach the point when you can consistently sell the number of tickets you need to sell? How can you cover your plane tickets to come in, pay for your own van and hotels? I have this kind of theory that in London, when you have an international artist and have to cover production, hotel and flight, probably if you play to an audience fewer than 1200 people, that’ll be hard to to do, but even when you get to the level of 1200, how do you keep that happening?

“One of the last good things about world music are the trendspotter tendencies. People who are ticking off bands that they have just seen once or twice, but again, this is part of the general consumption of music. So I asked myself, how does an artist develop a sustainable career?

I give you an example, we have worked with a traditional artist from Peru called Susana Baca. She’s an artist whose music I love and we went on a trajectory with her of putting on her show at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, then the Barbican and finally we arranged a 2000 capacity show at the Royal Festival Hall. However the last time I saw her, she was in front of 60 people at the Jazz Cafè. You know that the quality of the music is there and she’s a great performer, but it’s kind of like: the audience came, saw her, get what she does, understood and liked like her music, but they are not going to become fans to the end degree. They don’t keep coming! It’s a balance and it also goes in waves. There’s was a big Latin wave years ago and we’re on the cusp of another big one. Unfortunately, it’s something we can swim towards, but we can’t make it happen: we’re too small a player”.

However, La Linea’s popularity is everything but small and its 2016 edition is aiming high. So, to end our conversation, we asked Andy to give us some previews of things to look out for…

“I think Chico Trujillo in particular is very strong as a band, but they do also touch all those other points. They have elements of Latin ska and cumbia but also have all kinds of elements of Chilean traditional music and other stuff that they’ve been listening to like Balkan brass, so I think they’re worth seeing. Criolo is always interesting, and in addition there’s also a tour happening around the U.K. with him which is important for us, because there’s still an audience regionally which is not well served now.

There was a time when the shows were running ahead of the audience, while today there are fewer shows, which is maybe also the case in London to some degree. There are fewer shows coming through which means that maybe it’s a better time to be promoting. It doesn’t mean that the audience is getting bigger, but that the audience that is already there has fewer shows to attend”.