Sonidos del golfo podcast sobre la música indie en Guayaquil, en temas de organización, comunicación y cultura.

Abstract

The research report "Sonidos del Golfo" utilizes the podcast format to portray a world of youth culture that is in the process of breakthrough. First, there is an outline of the rise of indie music, from its start in the 1950s and 1960s, and then how this ecological growth led it to cover the world all around. The document also expounds the philosophy of the indie movement. This movement combines self-management and independent artisanal work to express an aesthetic resistance towards the mainstream music industry in which all creativity risks being swallowed up by commercial interests. Local indie in Ecuador is fragmented both temporally and geographically. This is largely due to the lack of cultural policy and media centralization that has neglected other areas. In Guayaquil in spite of its rich musical traditions there have yet to emerge any really formal ways to capture what is stirring there until now. "Sonidos del Golfo" tries to fill that gap by producing a space where both recording and transmission interweave interviews, snapshots of landscapes, and narrative elements fit the whole thing together. It links music and identity and places, interweaving artistic storytelling with cultural studies. Qualitative data collection methods including semi-structured interviews, participant observation, and documentary analysis are utilized in this study to reconstruct the life stories of musicians, sound engineers, and producers involved in warm-up audio production in Guayaquil. The research finds that survival in this cultural movement means both autonomy and access to digital platforms; but economic, technical, and visibility obstacles still remain. In the closing section of the paper, the thesis seeks to use podcasts as a digital presence and repository for common cultural resources while supporting the city’s identity. It also sketches out some basic measures to broaden the podcast’s influence and cultivate cooperative networks that will provide a context where independent music is rooted in social referent as symbolic resistance.