#InConversationWith Daniel Bacchieri

We are a community of people in every profession and sector using music to create more value in towns and cities all over the world. In the special series ‘In Conversation With’, we talk to accomplished members of our community and uncover their journey. Our second story features Daniel Bacchieri, a Journalist, Researcher, Content Producer from Rio Grande, Brazil, currently based in Melbourne, Australia.

Profile at a Glance

• Full Name: Daniel Bacchieri

• City, Country: Melbourne, Australia

• Work Profile/Designation: Journalist, Researcher, Content Producer

• Current Company: StreetMusicMap (founder and curator) and Monash University (PhD candidate)

• Previous Notable Work:StreetMusicMap (two-time Webby Award Nominee)

• Current favourite artist from your city: since Melbourne is a city with a solid busking scene, I will invite the reader to take a look at the lineup of street musicians that I’ve been curating throughout several playlists available here

• An initiative that boosts music economy/ contributes to the development of music in your city: regarding music in the streets, the city of Melbourne has been promoting several busking events in the Central Business District

How did you first start working in the Media Industry?

I've been working as a journalist, film director, multimedia producer and music curator since the late 1990's. I signed my first contract as an intern journalist in 1998, when I became a radio reporter at Radio Gaúcha, in Porto Alegre, Brazil. Newsradio was a powerful school for me. It helped me to improvise, to be responsible to the audience right away, to double check the sources, to produce fast and with high quality. From 1999 to 2003 I worked as a newsradio reporter and as a TV editor (with a brief experience as a TV news reporter). The TV environment inspired me to work with film editing in 2004. I went from TV broadcasting to music videos, documentaries, commercials, and branded content films for production companies. In 2017 I spent the first semester in New York as a Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism Fellow at CUNY. And, since 2019, I live in Melbourne researching street music as a PhD candidate at Monash University (School of Media, Film and Journalism).

How did music influence your work in Media?

When I was film editing on a daily basis, music gave me the timing, the beat to cut, to put rhythm in a scene. Besides playing a pivotal role in my craft, I’ve always been a music fan, looking for concerts and digging new music through all analog and digital platforms!

What made you start StreetMusicMap?

IIn 2014 I decided to apply my diverse background into one single project: StreetMusicMap on Instagram. But my first insight for a content production came around August 2013, in the streets of Kyiv, Ukraine: during that trip, I recorded a short video of a musician and posted it on my Instagram profile. He was playing a string instrument I had never seen before called bandura. I was going to take a picture, but Instagram had just released its 15-seconds video format. I made the recording and realised that 15 seconds was an adequate length for such a narrative. After that trip, I returned to Brazil and moved from Porto Alegre to São Paulo, where I began to record street musicians that I encountered on Paulista Avenue. I started recording and uploading street music videos on my Instagram. Then I created an Instagram series, with the hashtag #streetmicrodocs. A great friend of mine, Max Laux, gave me a single and important tip: “Why don’t you turn this street music series of yours into an Instagram account?”. Months later, during a free consultation from the Brazilian Startups’ Association, I changed the name of the project to StreetMusicMap.

In 2016, Instagram increased the video length to 1 minute, which enabled the project to expand. In the last 8 years, StreetMusicMap became a multimedia project: a collaborative listing of street music performers from all over the world. It has more than 1,850 artists documented on videos in 102 countries, filmed by more than 700 collaborators. A live album with street bands from São Paulo, Brazil, was released in 2016: StreetMusicMap Vol. 1 - Live at O.bra Festival (Loop Discos). It is also the first project to curate street musicians on Spotify, creating global playlists featuring the best buskers in the world. StreetMusicMap Radio (available on several streaming platforms) is the podcast version of the research on street music.

In 2019, StreetMusicMap got selected to be part of the MIT Docubase, an interactive curated database of the people, projects, and technologies transforming documentary in the digital age. _docubase is a project of MIT Open Documentary Lab, MIT Comparative Media Studies/Writing, in collaboration with IDFA DocLab, i-Docs, National Film Board of Canada, The Guardian, supported by MacArthur Foundation, Art Works, and MIT Global Studies and Languages.

To read the full interview, network with Daniel Bacchieri & our 1400+ global members, and get a chance to be featured as part of our #inconversationwith series, join the Music Cities Community!