structural:reformatting
Samba in the 21st century

During the second half of the 1990s, the increase in the illegal sale of cassette tapes and, mainly, compact discs caused a deep crisis in the music industry in Brazil, which worsened, from the 2000s, with the possibility of digital download, often free of charge, of musical works via the internet. In this context, there was a sharp drop in the commercialization of official samba records and their sub-genres, especially pagode. Samba groups of huge commercial success in the 1990s, such as Raça Negra and Só Pra Contrariar, saw their sales drop substantially at the turn of the 21st century. In addition, in a space of a few decades, samba songs played in the media have declined, with the genre it is almost always represented by the sub-genre pagode in the Brazilian charts. Of the 100 most heard artists on Brazilian radio between 2010 and 2019 on the Crowley Official Broadcast Chart, only 11 were from samba – and all from pagode. In another survey, carried out jointly between Kantar Ibope Media and Crowley Broadcast Analysis, the pagode corresponded to only 9% of the radio audience in Brazil in 2019, too far from the dominant sertanejo (Brazilian country music genre), whose slice represented about one third of the radio audience in the country.

Even so, the first two decades of the 21st century confirmed the pagode as the hegemonic reference of samba in the Brazilian music industry. In the first decade of this century, new artists emerged commercially, such as the samba bands Grupo Revelação, Sorriso Maroto and Turma do Pagode, and some singers who left their original samba groups to launch a solo career, such as Péricles (former Exaltasamba), Belo (former Soweto) and Alexandre Pires (former Só Pra Contrariar). In the following decade, it was the turn of Xande de Pilares and Thiaguinho, former vocalists of Revelação and Exaltasamba respectively, and of singers Mumuzinho, Ferrugem and Dilsinho. A characteristic common to all these artists was the significant amount of live album releases instead of traditional studio albums. This gained even more strength with the development of streaming media, a platform for digital music that became popular in the 2010s.

Outside the hegemonic commercial scope of the subgenre pagode, the late 1990s was also a period of great visibility and notoriety for the most traditional samba in Rio de Janeiro. A new generation of musicians emerged in "rodas de samba" that spread through several neighborhoods in the city, especially in Lapa, the central region of the city that started to concentrate several bars and restaurants with live music. For having identified with the bohemian neighborhood, this movement became known informally as "samba da Lapa". With a repertoire composed of classics sambas and without concessions to more modern sub-genres, this new circuit promoted the meeting between beginning and veteran musicians from several generations of sambistas, all identified with the traditional elements that make up the urban Carioca samba. Among some artists who acted in the scope of samba circles in this neighborhood, were Teresa Cristina and Semente group, Nilze Carvalho and Sururu na Roda group, Luciane Menezes and Dobrando a Esquina group, Eduardo Gallotti and Anjos da Lua group, among others, besides veterans such as Áurea Martins. And later, Edu Krieger and Moyseis Marques has appeared. Other new artists linked to the samba traditions, but without direct ties to the Lapa carioca movement, emerged such as Dudu Nobre and Diogo Nogueira, in addition to Fabiana Cozza in São Paulo.

In the institutional field, the Brazilian National Institute of Historic and Artistic Heritage declared in 2007 the modern Carioca samba and its matrixes samba de terreiro, partido-alto and samba-enredo as Intangible Cultural Heritage in Brazil.