The Status Quo In Spain

Live music generated euro 194.6 million in 2015, a 12.1 percent increase compared with the year before. About 22 million people attended live gigs, which is a long way from the all-time high of 2008, which was 33 million.

“It has been going down since,” Albert Salmerón of Spanish promoters’ association APM told Pollstar. “In 2014 we had more than 94,000 concerts, but this has also been going down since 2008, when we reached more than 130,000,” he said.

2008 marks the year Spain went into an economic recession. So it is not a big surprise live business declined as well. While audience numbers have indeed been shrinking – people started spending money on live music again two years ago, according to Salmerón – this was never the main issue.

Luis Miguel Barral González, organizer of the annual Festival Congress at the BIME music industry conference in Bilbao, says: “Live music consumption is less affected by the economic crisis because it is part of the less rational purchase decision making. When someone is a fan of a band, their resistance to paying practically vanishes.

“This is even more true when it comes to festivals because it’s not just about seeing your bands, but also about the encounter with your friends and your generation. A festival is much more than live music, it is one of the happiest moments of the year.”

The real struggle for promoters came with the VAT increase from 8 percent to 21 percent in 2012, as well as the fee paid for music authors’ rights, which has been 10 percent in Spain until recently ruled illegitimate by the country’s supreme court. Despite the economic crisis, festivals of all shapes and sizes have been sprouting in the country.

“In 2015 we had 885 festivals according to the Spanish Department of Culture. In the last 10 years, in spite of the crisis, there’s been an important increase in festivals. Many festivals have grown significantly, too,” says Salmerón. A lot of those festivals are state-sponsored, which poses a problem to promoters all over Europe, as the state will always be able to outcompete them price-wise.

The Spanish economic crisis may have affected government budgets, but not significantly enough to make it a promoter’s playing field again.

“Some festivals have been canceled due to poor ticket sales. And others have been canceled due to licensing problems with the regional governments,” he said. “What is more, with so many festivals there’s a strong competition to get headliners. There aren’t enough headliners for so many festivals, which is why many festivals increasingly book Spanish acts as headliners,” Salmerón explained.

How to engage audiences in these times of fierce competition will be a main topic at the Festival Congress at this year’s BIME, Oct. 26-28. “We invite festivals to go deeper in the understanding of fans, their profiles, their interests, the motivations that lead them to choose the festival,” González said “The modern promoter requires an understanding about who their ‘clients’ are, to learn from the data in order to provide the best possible experiences: we call it ‘beyond-the-line-up-thinking.’”