Blog Carnaval da Nazaré

The problem

Carnaval da Nazaré marches are songs written and performed by local artists every year to celebrate Carnaval, part of the local culture and tradition.

The marches have always been played on local radio, and during the 2000s they were compiled onto a CD sold by the committee — copies of it are still around in houses across Nazaré. But that CD never included every march released that year; those circulated by email, chats like MSN Messenger, and there was even a cloud drive (SkyDrive) set up as an archive for Carnaval marches, which I also contributed to.

At some point I started sharing the digital files within groups of friends, getting them from the groups and other associations themselves, and that’s how word spread. There was no central, easy-to-find place to discover, listen to and share them.

The solution

I was already studying computer science, so building a dedicated blog let me learn web development while solving the marches’ distribution problem. I started by publishing the marches as MP3s (with lyrics and credits), then moved to karaoke videos on YouTube so anyone could listen, learn and read some of the typical expressions used in the lyrics.

It started out free on Blogger and stayed there for a few years, until I built a custom website on Wordpress. That made it much easier to publish content — besides the marches, we also had historical content, interviews and contests.

On the video side, the early YouTube uploads were static images edited with Windows Movie Maker. Later, when I started making karaoke videos, I learned to edit in Premiere Pro and After Effects, producing animations and audiovisual content for editing and putting videos together. I’d receive photos and videos from the Carnaval groups, put the karaoke video together and publish it on the date they set.

I also created and ran the social media channels (Facebook and Instagram) — the Facebook page has 10,000 followers and strong reach across the region.

Impact

For more than 10 years, the blog was the only digital place where Carnaval da Nazaré marches were released. It reached the top 50 of national blogs and logged over 3,000 daily visitors during Carnaval season.

I also got the chance to go on national TV, on TVI, to talk about the blog. 2021 was the blog’s last year of activity, and it shut down that same year. The YouTube channel and the social media pages are still up, even though there’s no new content.