Sanremo is a televised song contest that helped inspire Eurovision, and the winner of the Sanremo festival also serves as Italy’s representative at Eurovision. That’s why Måneskin was considered a long shot when it was selected to compete in the Sanremo festival earlier this year.
“The most important music we were exporting was classical music.” “Nothing really crossed the borders during all these years,” Rosi said. But while rock inched closer and closer to the mainstream, Italy never produced a major rock band. Rosi and his colleague Luca Fantacone came of age in the indie rock world of the 1990s.
Italy had a vibrant progressive rock scene in the 1970s, and an alternative rock scene in the late 1980s. The biggest contemporary Italian act in the world today is Andrea Bocelli, a 62-year-old opera singer. Italy has birthed some of the world’s finest musicians, but its primary melodic exports have been classical music and opera. They’ve also gone viral on TikTok, the music industry’s de facto hitmaker, and their respective followings on social media have mushroomed to more than 20 million people across the major platforms.įor a while, it seemed Måneskin’s fate would be as one of Italy’s top rock bands. And their three biggest songs were streamed more than 433 million times on Spotify in the month of July alone. Their songs “Beggin’” and “I Wanna be Your Slave” both rank among the top 20 most popular songs in the world, hitting the charts in more than 30 countries each. And they’ve done it faster than any Eurovision winner ever, another indication of how quickly stardom can happen in the digital age.įor the past few months, the band has been one of the most popular musical groups on Spotify and YouTube, the world’s two most-popular online music services. But Måneskin, whose name is the Danish word for moonlight, has instead achieved a level of global popularity unprecedented in the history of Italian rock. Though Eurovision remains the most popular music competition event in Europe, it hasn’t produced a major pop star since Celine Dion won in 1988. After winning the Eurovision song contest, the Italian rock band Måneskin was supposed to disappear from the global music scene.