The Festival Bubble: Why Giant-Scale Music Events Are Everywhere This Summer

For a long time now, the word “summer” has become synonymous for many affluent individuals with music festivals. Benicassim, Madrid, Bilbao, Barcelona, Vilanova i la Geltrú, Alcalá de Henares, Santiago de Compostela, Palencia, Villarobledo… There is no city or town that wants to be without its festival. So much so, that you could spend the entire months of July and August jumping from mosh pit to mosh pit without having to take a single day off… even if that means seeing Ginebras for the fifteenth time.

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Another year more Jota singing at Primavera Sound

It’s not that I don’t like Ginebras. On the contrary, they’re a fabulous group. The same goes for La Casa Azul, Sidonie, Amaia, Veintiuno, Ladilla Rusa, Lori Meyers, or Love of Lesbian. The problem is that attending a music festival is increasingly becoming equivalent to taking an Interrail trip: you pay relatively little, see many things, understand little of what happened, and repeat year after year, even though it will never be the same as the first time.

In fact, it’s like taking the same Interrail trip over and over again but making only small changes to the itinerary. The companies behind the mega-festivals know that the audience anticipates seeing Rufus or Florence + The Machine with more excitement than discovering a new band. And in the end, festivals become a Groundhog Day of fun: a lot of it, but always the same.

Not to mention the harm it does to smaller venues. Sure, you, who go to festivals, may also go to concert halls throughout the year to enjoy exclusive performances, savor two-hour concerts in an intimate setting, and support the artists. But the majority of people settle for the marathon, treating it like a Netflix series: twenty bands in a row, and the next week the same twenty, but in a different location. How many times can one listen to “Emborracharme” without getting bored or feeling like they’re experiencing the same concert over and over again?

This may be controversial, but festivals (whether it’s BBK, MadCool, or Primavera) somehow devalue music by offering it in bulk, as if it were a dump truck of notes and songs. Now it’s Amaral, then El Drogas, and twenty minutes later it’s Iván Ferreiro. Everything is presented without the capacity to be truly enjoyed or savored, with beers priced at fifteen euros and restrooms crowded with people praying not to be poisoned when they close the door. The audience is treated like cattle, a necessary nuisance for the organizers to make money.

Note: I’m not trying to turn anyone against festivals – who am I to do that? – but I would like for them to be viewed with a bit more critical thinking, more like a factory producing mass-produced sausages rather than promoters of the arts concerned about our well-being and the well-being of music. If the festival next door used a band that brought in more money, we’ll book them next year. And again, and vice versa. Music as a business rather than art, still enjoyable as ever, but much more sinister than it has ever been.

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