Noel Schajris 2.0: The Latin Star on His 20th Anniversary & New Subscription Model Billboard 3 hrs ago Noel Schajris
The summer of 1997, Noel Schajris arrived in Mexico from Argentina with $600 in his pocket — the proceeds from the sale of his upright piano. He had left behind his sick mother and a fledgling music career for the promise of stardom as the singer of a Mexican funk band. The group went nowhere, but Schajris signed as a solo artist with Sony Mexico and released his debut album,
Cita en las Nubes (
Date in the Clouds), in 1999. It marked the start of a career that has lasted two decades and seven solo albums, as well as five more as half of the Grammy Award-nominated duo Sin Bandera.
While the COVID-19 pandemic delayed Schajris’ 20th-anniversary plans, it also opened him up to new creative ventures. “It was an awakening,” he says. In 2020, he launched a multimedia platform on his website (noelschajris.fan) that provides exclusive access to content, merchandise, tickets, streaming and album sales to over 500 monthly subscribers.
“The pandemic made me realize where I stood, and I said, ‘It’s time to move,’” he says. “My goal was to be really close to fans; to take everything from the kitchen directly to them. To do that, I needed to have my own business.”
Schajris still records and tours with Sin Bandera, which is managed and booked by Westwood Entertainment and signed under the Sony banner. For the past two years, he has been fully independent on his own Dynamo Productions label, which is distributed through Spain-based Altafonte; and he’s managed by Diana Rodríguez of Criteria Entertainment, whose clients include Moby and Draco Rosa.