We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Kristen Ibarra And Celeste Cadena Of Vinilious. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Kristen Ibarra and Celeste Cadena below.

Kristen Ibarra and Celeste Cadena, appreciate you joining us today. Let’s start with what makes profitability in your industry a challenge – what would you say is the biggest challenge?

We’ve learned a lot about the music industry since dabbling in music booking and promoting and what we’ve learned is that it’s extremely hard to profit when you support the kind of artists we support, especially when you’re more of a people person than a business person. We have heard time and time again from independent artists that it’s really tough to get paid as a musician unless you are selling out concerts and have a huge following, so part of our mission at Vinilious is to pay the artists we book a fair guarantee. However, when an artist is not very well known, you have to spend more money on promoting in addition to the offer made, so costs add up QUICKLY. When you don’t sell enough tickets to break even— or cover all of the costs you’ve put into producing a live music event, it gets challenging to continue offering artists everything you’d like to offer them.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

We are Kristen Ibarra and Celeste Cadena, a speech therapist and educator, booking and promoting in San Antonio, Texas. We are big supporters of female, Latin, local, lgbtq+ artists. In 2020 when everyone was stuck at home, Celeste suggested that we should start a curated pop-up vinyl shop so that we could sell vinyl of all of the artists we love and want to support. This evolved a bit as I (Kristen) thought how cool it would be to bring the artists for which we had vinyl to sell, to San Antonio. San Antonio historically has not had many Latin Indie artists being booked or promoted here and for the longest time we were jealous of other cities’ music scenes, like Austin and LA. They got all the cool artists coming to town! Well, Celeste encouraged me to learn about booking and promoting and here we are now. We’ve booked artists including Estevie (LA), Juanpalitoschinos (Mexico City), Cancamusa (Chile), BALTHVS (Colombia), Desta French (London) and more! And 99% of the artists we’ve booked have been Latina-fronted artists, many also part of our lgbtq+ familia.
We have also helped book a few Texas tours for indie artists free of charge as we know how taxing it can be on an independent artist who usually has to do everything themselves and it ends up being an investment in their art rather than a profiting job. Also, with the constant fight for women’s rights and ways that some people talk about immigrants, we feel strongly about continuing our journey and mission to support the artists we’ve been supporting, not just in San Antonio, but all across Texas and hopefully beyond.

How did you put together the initial capital you needed to start your business?

Vinilious started out as a passion project and continues to be. Celeste and I pull from our own pockets to purchase the vinyl that we sell, make offers to artists and pay for everything else that goes into producing a live music event (marketing, guarantees, venue rental, equipment rental, hospitality, lodging, etc.). Offering what we initially started to offer artists has become a big challenge to say the least.

What do you think helped you build your reputation within your market?

Fortunately there is a market for the artists we bring to San Antonio, though we don’t fully know the extent of it as we don’t have tons of money for marketing. We have caught the eyes and ears of some amazingly talented and generous people who believe in our mission and have offered their support as well as put forth their time and resources to help
Vinilious look legit and to spread the word! Local artists and vendors have set up at our music events which has created a super pleasant environment. Our friends Nathan Christ, Diego Chavez and April Beth Medina have created beautiful videos to help showcase the artists we’re bringing, our talented photographer cousin, Chris Saucedo, and amiga Sid Rodriguez-Tovar, have taken gorgeous photos of our shows and it means the world to us. We don’t take what everyone has done for us lightly and we try to keep our relationships strong as everything we do has only come to fruition with the support and enthusiasm of our community.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://vinilious.my.canva.site/vinilious
• Instagram: https://Www.instagram.com/vinilioussatx

Image Credits

Chris Saucedo, Sid Rodriguez-Tovar