Fest 411: Primavera Sound’s Marta Pallarès Takes on Patriarchy, British Parliament

Beyoncé, Taylor Swift, P!NK and Karol G are just a few of the superstars paving the way for current and future generations of female artists, but there are others behind the scenes doing their parts to help the women working to make shows happen every night as well as those who are in the audience.

Marta Pallarès, head of press and public relations at Primavera Sound, one of the biggest festivals in the world, is one of those women doing her part to make the music industry more inclusive and diverse. She has gone through her crusade with an intrepidness that likely comes from her cultural journalism background, taking on the patriarchy however she can. One way was going before the UK Parliament last year to discuss the “Misogyny in Music” report carried out by the Women and Equalities Committee.

The report, which collected testimonies from women in the industry, confirmed that the music business is essentially a “boys’ club” where “sexual harassment and abuse” against women is common. Pallarès was the only non-British person to appear before the Parliament for a session, which focused on the safety of women and gender equality at live music events.

Though the committee’s findings aren’t surprising, they are still shocking. But Pallarès is hopeful that acknowledging the issue and talking about it in a formal setting is the first step to legislation.

“I compare it as in you wouldn’t be able to open the restaurant if your kitchen is dirty with someone coming in to check it, saying that it isn’t clean, the electricity isn’t wired properly and the food is rotten,” Pallarès tells Pollstar. “How is it possible to open a music venue without an anti-sexual harassment protocol?”

And Pallarès isn’t just all talk. One of the reasons she was invited by the UK Parliament was because of her work with Primavera Sound, an annual festival based in Barcelona that has not only expanded into other cities in Spain but has gone global. The 2019 edition of the event was a game-changer for organizers of the event by having a gender-balanced lineup that included J Balvin, Cardi B, Janelle Monáe, Erykah Badu, Rosalía and Tame Impala as headliners. It marked the first time the company considered gender parity for its flagship event, calling it “The New Normal,” and they plan to continue carrying that out this year.

“It just made sense that we wanted to continue doing it because it was a pledge,” Pallarès says. “We said it from the very beginning: this is not a PR stunt. This is what we believe.”

One would think such a pledge would be welcomed by fans, but Pallarès was disheartened to read online posts slamming Primavera Sound’s efforts to offer a lineup that better represented women and promoted different genres.

“Man, you should have seen our social media,” Pallarès says. “It was mayhem; it was hell on earth. Trolls saying, ‘This is about music, not about your stupid agenda.’ We faced all this hate during the first month, but that started to change slowly, and we started getting more praise from young girls who had never attended a music festival before. They were telling us that they would feel safe [going to such an event], and also gay boys told us they’d go because they felt it wouldn’t be an all-macho event and they could have fun with their friends.”

Pallarès got even more validation from Geoff Barrow of Portishead and Beak, who said he had never seen such a diverse audience. The positive feedback from artists and fans inspired Primavera Sound to go outside of Europe and into Latin America, a region hungry for live events. The festival stepped into Brazil, Argentina and Chile in 2022 and ventured into other regions the following year, including Road to Primavera concerts in Colombia and Peru. A total of 350,000 fans attended Primavera Sound events in South America in 2023.

The expansion of the festival and its initiatives is not only essential for the brand but for the music industry and culture at large, Pallarès says.

“With modesty, we feel that this is the survival of culture,” Pallarès says. “We are seeing so many festivals being canceled all over the world. It is a difficult moment. … The industry got weaker somehow because we lost smaller agents that made it so rich. All of a sudden, it was the survival of the strongest, and that’s not how we approach it. … In the end, it’s about diversity. It’s an evolutive advantage. We want to be inclusive and want to be able to portray so many different types of music to so many different people. This is how we have to do it.”

That diversity is evident when one looks at the fans attending Primavera Sound, which makes Pallarès optimistic – even in a European music industry facing “endemic” misogyny.

“If you were just able to witness a night at Primavera, you would have so much hope for the future,” Pallarès says. “Girls from Mexico there; older guys enjoying their dark music, into their obscure Belgian metal doom band; and hip-hop fans – everyone mixed and matched, and it was amazing. That’s what gives us hope.”