Historical record. The desire for live music left by two years of the pandemic has pushed the collection of live music in 2022 to numbers never seen before. Long. If there was any doubt about how the sector would recover after long months of social distancing, masks and curfews, the answer has been resounding. The Live Music Yearbook 2023 released today shows that last year 459.2 million euros were raised from the sale of tickets for concerts and festivals. This represents not only an increase of 191% compared to the 157 million of the ill-fated 2021 but 20.03% more than in 2019, a year of historic income for the sector, when, however, 77 million less were collected.
Albert Salmerón, president of the Association of Music Promoters, has released the data, recalling that after experiencing “an intense crisis, a debacle of live music due to the pandemic, we return to the good news, the good numbers.” Some numbers whose amount has inhabited three clearly prominent autonomous communities: Madrid, with 22% of total income and 103 million, Catalonia with 21% and 97 and Andalusia with 76 million income. The data from Madrid pulverize its 2019 figures, then of just over 60 million euros, and surpass Catalonia, which was the leading Community in that record year and which has had a smaller increase.
The ranking of national tours has been resoundingly headed by Fito
In the macro-festivals, the winner by far has been Primavera Sound with 500,700 spectators in its two weekends, while Mad Cool has achieved 310,000 and Arenal Sound 300,000. Sónar has achieved 122,644 and has been in ninth position. As for seasonal cycle festivals, the most popular was the Marenostrum Fuengirola, with 188,106, followed by Noches del Botánico (122,858) and Las Noches del Malecón de Murcia (119,283). The Jardins de Pedralbes Festival was the fifth with 75,316.
Salmerón has pointed out that after “a very dark and complicated period, these data show the strength of the live music sector, nobody knew how we were going to get out but it has been shown that the sector is at a very high level of maturity and with a great strength”. And he concluded that “we do not believe that we have reached a ceiling, we do not know, it is a sector in constant growth and there is still a long way to go as we see in other countries where we are still far below our turnover, we believe that there is still a long way to go and a lot of ground to explore.
