‘Festivals Today Carry A Greater Responsibility Than Ever’: Q’s With Mad Cool Festival’s Cindy Castillo

Mad Cool Festival is celebrating its 10th anniversary this year. The jubilee lineup is led by Foo Fighters, Florence + The Machine, Twenty One Pilots, Moby, King Of Leon, Halsey, Wolf Alice, Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, David Byrne, and many more.

For Pollstar’s annual Spain Focus, we reached out to Mad Cool’s deputy director Cindy Castillo to talk about the ten-year milestone, how to balance scale with authenticity, the importance of live music in an increasingly digital and uncertain world, and more.

Madrid’s Mad Cool Fest Celebrates 10th Year With ‘Renewed Sense of Energy’

Pollstar: What’s your state of mind from a business and a personal perspective?
Cindy Castillo: From a business perspective, I feel very focused and energised. We’re in a moment where the live industry continues to evolve quickly, so there’s a constant need to adapt, anticipate trends, and stay sharp while still protecting what makes festivals special in the first place. It’s demanding, but also incredibly stimulating.

On a personal level, festival season always brings a mix of excitement and intensity. It’s a very immersive world, once you enter the Mad Cool vortex, it really does take over everything. But I genuinely enjoy that pace and sense of purpose. There’s something very rewarding about working towards creating experiences that mean so much to so many people.

How’s Mad Cool 2026 shaping up, and how does it compare to 2025 at this point in time? Any specials planned for the anniversary?
Mad Cool 2026 is shaping up very positively. At this stage, we feel confident about the direction of the lineup, the conversations we’re having, and the overall strategic vision for the edition. Compared to this same point last year, I’d say we have even greater clarity around what we want to achieve creatively and operationally.

As it’s an anniversary edition, naturally there is an added sense of responsibility and excitement. We want to honour the journey of the festival while also looking forward. We’re exploring ways to celebrate that milestone.

What’s the biggest challenge in pulling off a festival of the size of Mad Cool in 2026?
Scale is both our greatest strength and our greatest challenge. When you’re operating at this level, every decision has a ripple effect artist logistics, production, ticketing, operations, sustainability, crowd flow, hospitality, weather contingencies, local regulations… it’s an ecosystem.

The biggest challenge is maintaining excellence and attention to detail across all those layers while still delivering something that feels exciting, fresh, and human.

What are the biggest opportunities?
The biggest opportunity is continuing to strengthen Mad Cool as not just a major European festival, but as a cultural platform with its own identity and international relevance.

We have an incredible city in Madrid, a highly engaged audience, and strong positioning between Europe, the UK, and Latin America. This creates huge possibilities in terms of artist discovery, partnerships, content, and cultural exchange.

Some festivals are doing better than ever despite the economic challenges. People seem to seek out magical live experiences even more in hectic and uncertain times like the current ones. What’s your opinion on all of this?
I completely agree. Live music has become increasingly valuable because it offers something genuinely irreplaceable: presence, connection, and shared emotion. In a world that feels increasingly digital, fragmented, and uncertain, people are craving moments that feel real.

A great festival offers much more than a concert lineup, it creates memory, identity, and community. I think audiences are becoming more selective, but also more intentional about where they invest their time and money.

In your own words: what makes up the soul of Mad Cool?
For me, the essence of Mad Cool lies in balancing scale with authenticity. From day one, the goal has been to create a festival with international standards and ambition, while preserving a sense of discovery, diversity, and genuine connection to the city and its audience.

Mad Cool is eclectic by nature. It brings together different generations, genres, and cultures in one space. There’s a sense of discovery alongside scale, which is not always easy to achieve. It’s international, but still deeply connected to its city.

We’re also specifically looking at Spain as a gateway to and from Latin America. Are you able to pick examples from your festival lineup that reflect this exchange of cultures? Is Latin America an important source of talent for your events?
Spain occupies a unique cultural position as a natural bridge between Europe and Latin America, and that exchange is very relevant to us.
Latin America is an incredibly rich source of talent, creativity, and audience engagement. Across recent editions, we’ve worked to reflect this by including some artists from across the Spanish speaking world and by paying close attention to emerging talent with strong cross market potential.

What’s next for Mad Cool? New additions, expansions, changes, evolution, anything that comes to mind?
The focus is on sustainable evolution rather than change for the sake of change. We’re always assessing how to improve the audience journey, site experience, production standards, hospitality offering, and artistic positioning. Mad Cool has reached a level of maturity where growth is less about getting bigger and more about getting better, sharper, and more distinctive.

Anything you’d like to add?
Only that festivals today carry a greater responsibility than ever. We’re not just programming artists, we’re building temporary communities and shaping experiences people will remember for years. That’s a privilege we take seriously, and it continues to motivate us every year.

Subscribe to Pollstar HERE