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Sony Music Entertainment agreed to acquire Som Livre, Brazil’s largest independent label, tightening its grip as the leader in recorded music sales in Latin America’s largest market.

The announcement on Thursday (April 1) — made jointly by Sony, Som Livre, The Orchard and Som Livre owners Grupo Globo, Latin America’s largest media and entertainment conglomerate — puts to rest months of speculation about who would walk away with one of Brazil’s largest and most valuable music catalogs.

Sony agreed to pay 1.44 billion Brazilian reais (about $255 million), according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Brazilian regulators still must approve the sale.

Som Livre will continue to function independently, they said, and will still sign, develop and promote its own roster of artists as well as provide services to Brazil’s musical community. Marcelo Soares will stay on as CEO of Som Livre, which he has run since 2007.

Founded in 1969 by music producer João Araújo, Som Livre initially focused on releasing soundtracks for Globo’s soap operas and continued to specialize in compilations. A decade ago, the label shifted its strategy to developing and managing artists and became the largest producer of music in Brazil, where local music represents almost 70% of total consumption.

Today, the label is home to more than 80 artists, including massive sertanejo act Jorge & Mateus, forró star Wesley Safadão and Latin Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter Maria Gadú. Som Livre artists had five out of the top 10 songs in Brazil in 2020, according to the IFPI 2021 Global Music Report. They included Henrique and Juliano’s “Liberdade Provisória,” the No. 1 streaming track in Brazil in 2020.

With the acquisition, Sony becomes an even more powerful player in the world’s 10th largest music market, where the major label is already the market leader in music sales, followed by Universal Music Group and Som Livre, according to Valor Econômico, the Brazilian business journal.

Long distributed by The Orchard, Som Livre will now also benefit from Sony’s additional global distribution resources.

While Sony, Universal and Warner Music have always mined a diverse roster and catalog of Brazilian music that includes major international artists (one of Sony’s crown jewels, for example, is crooner Roberto Carlos), Som Livre has long focused on local genres like sertanejo, pagoda, funk and MPB.

The Brazilian label has grown for more than 10 years in a row, “at a faster speed than the market,” Marcelo Soares, CEO of Som Livre, said in November when the label’s sale was announced.

Som Livre has benefited from the powerful promotion of its parent company, Rio de Janeiro-based Grupo Globo, which has said it was selling the label as part of an organizational restructuring. Now, Som Livre will benefit from Sony’s marketing and distribution muscle worldwide, an increasingly important tool in a world of global streaming where consumption of Latin music, including music in Portuguese, has accelerated beyond Latin America.

“Globo’s support was fundamental for Som Livre’s growth, particularly in the past decade,” Soares says. “Now, looking to the future, it’s very exciting to know we have Sony Music with us.”

Brazil, which formerly suffered from rampant piracy of physical media like CDs and cassettes, was the fastest-growing music market in Latin America in 2020, helping fuel it to six straight years as the world’s fastest-growing region.

Amid the tumult of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has hit Brazil harder than most — the country has suffered more than 317,000 deaths from the virus — Brazil’s recorded music revenues grew by 24% ($60.4 million) to $306.4 million in 2020. Although rampant devaluation saw its placement in the global rankings dip from No. 10 to No. 11, on a total physical and digital basis it ranked 10th globally, with a 36.1% increase to $260 million in those formats. While physical revenues fell to below ½ percent of Brazil’s total, streaming grew by 84% to $256.6 million, according to IFPI.

Marisa Pizarro, Def Jam’s senior vice president of A&R, found herself working on ways to support the Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) community during a time she could’ve never predicted would be incredibly essential.

Pizarro, who recently helped launch Def Jam Philippines, is an executive board member of Universal Music Group’s Team of Pacific Islanders & Asian Americans (UTOPIAA). The employee resource group began in September 2019 with goals of increasing mentorship opportunities and career development for AAPI employees at the company. UTOPIAA’s formation came just four months shy of the year hate crimes against Asians in 16 major U.S. cities rose 150%, according to a recent analysis from the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at Cal State University San Bernardino.

The beginning of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic marked an extremely volatile and violent time for Asian Americans, when former president Donald Trump was criticized for reinforcing a hostile environment for people of Asian descent by describing the pandemic as the “Kung Flu” and “China Virus.” Stop AAPI Hate, an organization that started up during COVID to combat anti-Asian discrimination, has logged approximately 3,800 reports of hate incidents targeting Asian Americans across the nation since March 2020.

The Billboard 2020 Women in Music top executive found herself and the rest of UTOPIAA switching gears to address the AAPI community’s needs. One way they sought to accomplish this was by organizing an AAPI Anti-Violence Town Hall to address the increased hate crimes and violence. The town hall, which was scheduled on March 17 after weeks of planning, happened to come just one day after three shootings in Atlanta-based spas killed eight people, six of whom were Asian American women.

“We literally had [the town hall] scheduled for weeks, and then Tuesday happened, and we were in shock,” Pizarro tells Billboard. “The way that Universal stepped up was like, ‘OK, what do you guys need right now?’ And it was crazy that we had that planned anyway. So it turned into obviously addressing Atlanta, addressing healing, but the original plan was to just talk about violence anyway. It was shocking that that happened, and amazing too, because we held the space for everyone right after, and it felt like we were there for the company. … We just wanted to open up the conversation. And then it became also a little bit of a healing session.”

She notes that originally 150 people had RSVPed to the town hall that was meant to open the conversation about the increased violence toward Asian Americans during the pandemic. But 450 people eventually attended that day, joined by Stop AAPI Hate’s co-founder and co-executive director of CAA Cynthia Choi, Little Tokyo Service Center’s director of community building and engagement Grant Sunoo, and Asian American Collective’s music industry veteran co-founders Zeena Koda (head of brand digital at The North Face), Grace Lee (head of artist relations, East Coast at YouTube) and Caroline Yim (co-head of hip-hop/R&B and music agent at WME).

“I loved the context of having them talk about allyship, and like we said, we’re all in this together. And I think that was a big message throughout the conversations,” Pizarro says. “You can change your inner circle and it makes a difference. You can change how your parents talk, you can change your friends. It doesn’t have to be this massive donation and millions and millions of dollars from a corporation. It could be just as small as me talking to my dad and being like, ‘This is what’s happening.’ It just made things very accessible. … The other thing that I loved about the town hall was the accountability and that realness in the convo. People were bringing up a lot of real sh–. Like, ‘Hey, my dad needs a real lesson.’ And I think a lot of us were even opening up to that, and that’s real. That’s hard to do.”

LA-based Filipino artist Kajo, who’s signed to Def Jam in partnership with Logic’s BobbyBoy Records, attended Universal’s town hall. He later told Pizarro that he “learned so much” from the conversation, especially about how to be more vocal within the creative community.

“It’s just so humbling and relatable to hear like, ‘Oh, this artist doesn’t know either? OK, let’s work it out together.’ We hold our artists to such high standards,” she explains, adding how it helped “just to hear that they’re also going through the sh– we’re going through.”

While trying to process the constant violence ravaging the AAPI community, Pizarro found herself switching from listening to one of her favorite artists, Drake, to Ruby Ibarra, a Filipino-American rapper whose “comforting” and “powerful” lyrics in Tagalog, Waray and English focus on her cultural heritage and immigrant experiences. “We have this whole continent of music out of Asia, and they’re killing it. But a lot of it doesn’t travel here, just either language or messaging,” Pizarro elaborates. “So we don’t have as many voices in American music, but when they do, they really resonate with us. There’s so few Asian American artists. The K-pop stuff of the world … it’s just a different story over there. It’s very specific to us.”

BTS, one of the biggest musical acts in the world, condemned the recent wave of anti-Asian hate crimes sweeping the United States. The K-pop supergroup opened up about moments when they “faced discrimination as Asians” but centered their statement on “the events that have occurred over the past few weeks.” Japanese-British singer Rina Sawayama wrote on Twitter that “A CRIME AGAINST ANY COMMUNITY IS A CRIME AGAINST US ALL” and has shared multiple links on how to support the families of Atlanta’s shooting victims. Despite the disparate experiences of global acts of Asian descent, these recent acts of violence have brought them together from all corners of the world so they can stand with each other in solidarity. And Pizarro thinks it’s time for record labels to join them.

“All of our stories are so valuable, especially when it comes to something like music, where it’s culture. The record labels have even more of a responsibility to reflect all of us,” Pizarro says. “We spend most of our time at work. This is our family, so to speak, most of the day. I think our stories, all of our stories, are really unique and exciting and bring something to the company.”

Universal wanted its ERGs to hop on a call and unpack better ways to serve minority communities, but those groups plan to take their cultural collaborations a step further. Pizarro mentions that PRISM, the ERG for LGBTQ+ members of Universal, pitched a drag fundraiser with Asian drag queens in partnership with UTOPIAA. “I was like, ‘This is f—ing genius,’” Pizarro recalls, adding that the next steps should involve all of UMG’s ERGs collaborating on cool ways to “solve the same problem.”

“I think now the programming turned from how to roll dumplings to how to be an ally. So I think that’s the next step. It’s just having real conversations, and that’s on us to do,” she says. “We don’t need to do an origami class. We need to have another town hall on Asian support of the Black community in the past. Those types of real things are the next steps.”