Popular music and phonographic archives. An archaeology of the recording industry in Ecuador

Abstract

This article examines the history of the recording industry in Ecuador through a triangulation of popular music, phonographic production, and material memory. Its objective is to reconstruct the development of the country's main record labels and highlight the historical conditions that explain the absence of a national phonographic archive. The methodology combined a literature review, the collection of scattered information on labels, catalogs, recording studios, and distribution networks, as well as the analysis of partial repositories, institutional collections, and private collections. Based on this, the major local labels—IFESA and FEDISCOS—and a significant number of ventures that enrich Ecuador's phonographic history are mapped. Among the preliminary conclusions, it is argued that the local recording industry was primarily organized according to a commercial logic, without consolidating policies for preserving phonograms as documentary heritage. Consequently, the country's sonic memory remains fragmented, dispersed, and largely sustained by private archives and heterogeneous documentary vestiges.