Live music in Spain, in official figures

Almost everything said about the Spanish live business gets said without figures. This article is the opposite: audited data only, from the Anuario de la Música en Vivo published by the promoters' association APM, and what it means if you programme shows.

The headline: €807 million

Ticket sales moved €807.2 million in 2025, against €725,609,673 in 2024. That is 11.24 % up, and a fourth consecutive year of growth.

It helps to know what that figure measures and what it does not: it is box office, not the whole business. Bar, sponsorship, merch and services sit outside it. When people talk about the sector's total economic impact the numbers go far higher; when they talk about what comes through the door, these are the ones.

Where the money is

Three regions hold 63 % of the market:

The figure worth reading twice is Madrid: almost 28 % growth in a year, and on its own nearly a third of everything billed in Spain. At province level, Barcelona takes €136.9 million (+20.62 %) and holds 83.9 % of the Catalan total.

And the one that hurts: Seville falls 22.38 %, to €27.5 million. Andalusia is the only one of the big three going backwards.

If you programme, this is not a statistical curiosity: it is where the audience is already buying, and where the selling has to work harder.

The tours, and what they actually say

The three national tours with most attendance in 2025:

Sabina played 100 % sold out. And here is what matters for the craft: Carrasco moved almost the same attendance as Sabina with ten fewer shows, which means clearly bigger rooms.

International runs on another logic entirely: Ed Sheeran drew 137,884 people across two concerts. Imagine Dragons, 112,419 across two. AC/DC, 103,946 across two. Two stadium dates move what an entire thirty-date national tour moves.

And on average per show, the surprising names are different again: Dellafuente at 58,815 per show, Aitana at 51,066 and Lola Índigo at 36,418 — above the per-show average of any of the three big tours above.

Festivals: the cycle format grows differently

Among the big festivals the order was Arenal Sound (300,000), Primavera Sound Barcelona (297,000, over 30,000 up on its previous edition) and Viña Rock (240,000).

But the interesting movement is in cycle festivals — those spreading shows across weeks rather than concentrating them into one weekend:

Icónica added 81,403 tickets on the previous year; Marenostrum, 51,124 more. No large festival matched those growth rates in percentage terms.

The format has an obvious advantage seen from production: the same build amortises across twenty-eight nights instead of three. And an equally obvious difficulty: you have to sell it twenty-eight times.

What to do with these numbers

If you programme, the useful comparison is not your year against your last one: it is against the market's +11.24 %. Growing 5 % in 2025 was, in fact, losing share.

If you negotiate with a venue or promoter, knowing Madrid grew 28 % while Andalusia fell 6.4 % changes the guarantee conversation entirely.

And if you are building a tour, the Dellafuente and Aitana lesson is the usual one, now with a number attached: average per show matters more than tour total. Fewer dates in bigger rooms can leave more than many small ones — and certainly leaves fewer dead days, which is where budgets come apart.

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Do you work with this data and see something that does not add up? Write to hello@onroad.live — this article gets updated with each edition of the Anuario.