Most of the “sold out” signs (sold outs, in its English term) that are posted in Spain are debatable. A perception that cannot be understood without observing how the live industry works today: the sold out It is an internal advertising tool within the music industry. In Madrid, the most paradigmatic case is the Movistar Arena (former WiZink Center), which has operated as a modular space for years. Although its maximum capacity is around 17,000 people, it allows configurations starting from just over 3,500 spectators and other intermediate ones of between 5,000 and 10,000. In these, the capacity offered for sale is exhausted, but the building, in physical terms, is far from full. The promoter and programmer Javier Domínguez (Madrid, 43 years old), better known as Ferrara, sums it up like this: “They try to sell an image of constant growth to justify numbers that often do not correspond to the reality of the artist.”
In this context, announcing a sold-out concert at a reference venue works as a legitimizing argument for festivals, public programmers or local promoters, even when the economic balance of the event has been fragile or directly negative. Ferrara, programmer of cycles such as Mazo Madrid or Sound Isidro, remembers an example that illustrates the extent to which this logic has become normalized: “On one occasion at Joy Eslava, with a capacity for 900, they had sold about 270 tickets, they had a list of 600 guests and they sang sold out”. This is not an isolated anecdote, but rather a recurring practice in markets where the story of growth carries as much weight as real attendance.
None of this can be explained without taking into account how the music industry has changed since the early years of the 21st century. The expansion of the festival model (in 2025, between 900 and 1,000 festivals were held in Spain) has changed the way in which artists are remunerated. Unlike concerts in halls, where income depends largely on ticket sales, at festivals musicians charge a fixed amount agreed in advance. In this scenario, hanging a “sold out” sign, whether true or not, becomes a negotiable asset: it does not serve so much to make that specific concert profitable as to raise the price of your presence at the festival.
For Juan Santaner (Mallorca, 59 years old), who currently runs Industrias Bala and has worked for decades in promoters, agencies and labels, this inflation has clear limits: “I understand that a group that performs in a venue charges 3,000 euros and in a festival 6,000. Because the festival has bars, sponsors, public aid… What you cannot do is charge 3,000 in the venue and 30,000 in the festival.” Santaner warns against artificial inflation: “I once left a company and everyone started calling me because my successor had tripled the caches. What I offered for 4,000 euros, he was offering for 15,000 and, of course, no group had experienced corresponding growth.”
Added to this logic is a material issue that is not very visible: the real costs of the live show. Not all “sold out” concerts are necessarily profitable, and the deficit is assumed as an investment in positioning. “Selling a successful screening is not free,” Ferrara insists. However, not all structures can afford to take that risk. There is the case of The Music Republic, a network that combines a representation agency with the ownership of festivals such as FIB, Festival de Les Arts or Viña Rock. In 2024, the American fund KKR acquired Superstruct Entertainment (owner of The Music Republic) for around 1.3 billion euros. In this ecosystem, a wheel is generated that is difficult to break: the same actors who inflate the caches of their artists are, at the same time, the only ones who can afford to pay them.
The consequences are felt especially strongly at small and medium-sized festivals. David Cuerdo (Oviedo, 45 years old) is one of the directors of Prestoso, a festival of 1,500 people in Cangas del Narcea: “Prestoso would be, at most, the smallest corner within a macro-festival. At festivals like ours, this practice affects us.” Cuerdo also points out the centralism of the sector. Before Prestoso, he was a programmer at the La Salvaje venue in Oviedo: “Once a band came that had filled La Riviera and had 17 people here. I have also had the case of a band that had 60 people at a free concert in Oviedo, and what they asked Prestoso for was 10,000 euros. For me that is lapidary: it does no good even to the person who earns those 10,000.” Ferrara, in addition to centralism, adds another distortion to calculate the price: “Monthly listeners do not go hand in hand with ticket sales. For me, for example, an urban artist with 200,000 or 300,000 listeners is equivalent to the ticket sales of a rock band with 30,000 or 40,000.”
A logic similar to Prestoso is observed in Festival Observatorio, which has been held for eight editions in Balboa (León) and deliberately maintains a reduced capacity. “We have been maintaining practically the same capacity for several years,” explain Hannah Olmedilla (Madrid, 28 years old), Jaime Torrego (Madrid, 29) and Iván Dueñas (Madrid, 34), organizers of the festival. However, Observatorio and Prestoso admit that, in certain cases, the bands are willing to lower their cache in exchange for other benefits. “There are artists who know that the cache that is requested at first does not make sense for a festival like ours, but they still want to come because it compensates for other reasons,” they point out from Observatorio. “Being on our lineup puts you in a showcase that is not proportional to the actual size of the festival, but to its potential within a certain niche.” From Prestoso they agree: “A group that in a macro festival would be in the third or fourth line, at most, here is the headliner. Furthermore, there are no overlaps: everyone goes to see you, and people come to listen to real music.”
Even so, the capitalist logic of the market is felt. From Observatorio they remember that in 2022 they were on the verge of canceling the edition: “We were in very bad sales and we had to launch a statement: if we did not sell X more tickets, the festival would not go ahead and the losses would come directly out of our pocket. The festival is always celebrated sold out, Although many times it is a lie, but the opposite is almost never said,” they point out. “And that is also part of the reality of the live show.”
Pressure to succeed
All those interviewed agree that the inflation of caches is accompanied by a growing pressure to appear successful: “We live in a sales culture of constant success,” explains Ferrara. “That puts pressure on artists to always try to go to larger capacities.” Santaner sums it up from experience: “I have worked with many artists who have been there for 20 years and are always in the same place. They have their audience and that is going to be them. And nothing happens. But for emerging artists it is another story.” That pressure is what sometimes kills emerging musical projects. Bego (Toledo, 37 years old), vocalist and leader of Monteperdido (band signed to Sonido Muchacho and dissolved in 2023) describes it like this: “Before Monteperdido I was not a person obsessed with numbers. I had the childish idea of wanting me to do well. That started when I entered that environment. The experience with the industry damaged me a lot psychologically.” After playing several times at the Sala El Sol, their next concert was planned in a larger room. Shortly after, he decided to walk away from the industry: “It broke my social fabric, my creativity, everything.” Even so, they avoided communicating the end as farewell: “The Copérnico concert was the last in Madrid, but we were forced to camouflage it for fear that the Sonorama and the Canela Party, where we were going to play that summer, would fall. That destroyed me, because the economic benefit of the industry was taken into account more than the well-being of the band itself.”
The use of sold out Fiction as a legitimization tool has ended up altering the balance of live streaming: it distorts the perception of success, stresses the establishment of caches and shifts risk towards the most fragile margins of the sector. The distance between narrative and reality not only affects the economy of venues and festivals, but also the sustainability of artistic projects themselves.