Nuria Andreu is from Barcelona and moved to Lanzarote after an intense career in the music industry, where she became marketing and communications director for Sony Iberia and also worked personally for artists of the caliber of Rosalía and Aitana.
“I came at the beginning of the year to live in Lanzarote, I wanted a bit of oxygen, perspective, quality of life, and tranquility to think about what I wanted to do and how I wanted to do it.”
Nuria Andreu's latest major challenge has been directing the Macondo universe for Shakira's residency in Spain, and she has done so from her home in Tías, Lanzarote.
From the laboratory to the music industry
Nothing seemed to indicate that Andreu would dedicate herself to the music world when, choosing her university degree, she opted for biomedicine with a specialization in neuroscience and consumer decision-making processes, in other words, neuromarketing.
In fact, she worked with large pharmaceutical companies and completed an MBA at the London School of Economics, which led her to open her own company.
“Together with two other partners, I set up a consulting and entrepreneurship start-up, a digital platform that connected CEOs through business and investment opportunities,” explains Andreu. The company would eventually be bought by the international consultancy Boston Group.
In parallel, the marketing expert began to embark on projects related to music. “I love music and I have always had many friends in that world; thanks to my experience in positioning products and brands, I helped them with consulting tasks, and at the same time, I opened a production company called Brainwash with which we made music videos.”
The production company grew, and in addition to producing music videos, it began to offer other services such as shoots or concepts for albums for major record labels like Universal Music or Sony.
The explosion of Motomami with Rosalía and the Aitana era
It was then that the president of Sony Music Iberia, José María Barbat, offered her to become part of the Sony Music team. “It hadn't even crossed my mind because music was something I enjoyed and liked, but something I was doing on the side.”
“First, I had a more strategic role to position each artist, how to convey what they wanted to convey, and a short time later I became the communications director for Sony Iberia,” shares Andreu.
Once at Sony, they offered her to work directly for Rosalía for the duration of Motomami with exclusive dedication, and later also with Aitana.
“With Rosalía, above all, I experienced the Motomami phase very closely, which was the international explosion of a Spanish artist, and with Aitana I experienced more the phase of establishing herself as the leading pop artist in Spain and starting that internationalization.”
When asked about her contribution to the artistic concepts of their albums, Andreu shares that both artists have very clear ideas. “The people who have been around them and working with them, what we normally do is make those ideas possible, make them tangible.”
“Rosalía is an artist who is absolutely clear about what she wants and how she wants to tell it. Her music is not just music, but also a brand concept and a huge visual and creative universe behind it. You are not just releasing a series of songs and an album, but you are releasing a narrative, a way of communicating, a dress code, an entire universe.”
Break in Lanzarote and Shakira's call
A few weeks after arriving on the island, they contacted her to advise on Macondo Park, “Shakira wanted a tribute to Latin culture from a more cultural angle and I loved the idea, I thought it was brilliant.”
The marketing and communication director, who was eventually hired as the director of the residency, explains that they worked against the clock to prepare in less than eight months a project that generally takes a year to launch. In collaboration with the promoter's team, Life Nation, they began generating ideas, seeking sponsors, and achieving “a balance between content for Shakira's fans and content that paid tribute to Gabriel García Márquez.”
Andreu shares that “One Hundred Years of Solitude" is one of Shakira's favorite books “because she considers it to have great cultural weight and to be a book that represents Latin culture from many aspects, such as bonds and family. In contrast to an era in which we are all hyperconnected, but there is great digital loneliness.”
"The concept was why does Latin culture succeed? and we represented it in eight vertical axes. We are all looking for a sense of belonging, to feel that you are part of a community, and Latin culture has that celebratory and community component," she explains.
"Furthermore, Shakira wanted to contrast the patterns inherited in families that García Márquez talks about with the cry that her album 'Las mujeres ya no lloran' represents for changing patterns in women," she completes.
A Women's Library and the 'Macondito' Universe
"I got very involved in the library, which has been a collaboration with Penguin. I wanted to have a space full of books and give a voice to women writers like Rosa Montero, Julia Navarro, Elizabeth Benavén, Nazaret Castellanos... Many women who are not normally on a music line-up have come."
“We are used to going to festivals where 80% of the line-up are men, so it seemed to me, as a woman, and a woman who works in the entertainment industry, that I had to fight for there to be a very female line-up where we mixed all these women authors with other disruptive women like Nati Peluso.”
“The fun part of this project was that people had already bought tickets. They knew there was something more, but they didn't know what they were going to find until weeks before. They arrived and found a Disneyland of music and culture where you had the performance of Amaia, performances by a lot of DJs, a Shakira museum in collaboration with Amazon, which had a stage solely for young emerging women like Claudia Arena or Ángeles Toledano.”
Precisely Disney was the collaborator with whom Macondito was designed. “I would tell you that without a doubt the library and Macondito have been my two favorite projects. Shakira knew she wanted a space for children, that represented the family and was a safe space.”
The collaboration with Disney for Macondito fit perfectly, as “they are about to release a movie, ‘Enchanted,’ which deals precisely with a mother and a daughter who have a very strong bond and the daughter discovers she has magical powers through a book in a tree.”
In Macondito there has also been space for sports, “which is also very important for Shakira. We had a goal with challenges that worked very well.”
Another star activity designed by Andreu were the artisanal ice creams made with fruit and no added sugars. La loba, made of dark chocolate, la mariposa amarilla, with lavender flavor and a symbol of Gabo's magical realism, and the third, the dai dai, a vanilla and strawberry flavored football representing the Spanish champions in the World Cup.
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