Salvador Leon Navarro |
Madrid (EFE) recurring: do international artists prefer Barcelona to Madrid?
Venue availability
“There is no competition between Madrid and Barcelona as such, but in certain seasons it seems that there is one thing that marks a lot when an artist plays in Barcelona, which is the availability of venues,” Robert Grima, president of Live Nation, explains to EFE. Madrid, who attributes to Barcelona the virtue of having permanently available venues such as the Olympic Stadium or the Palau Sant Jordi.
Faced with this, venues of a similar magnitude in Madrid have to balance schedules to get around sports competitions: in addition to the Santiago Bernabéu and the Metropolitan Stadium, the capital has to face the handicap of coordinating WiZink Center concerts, with around 3,000 fewer locations. than the Palau, with the Real Madrid and Estudiantes basketball league matches.
“It’s not good, because it doesn’t give real data, taking a still photograph at a specific moment when Elton John or Coldplay are going to perform in Barcelona,” says Manuel Saucedo, head of Impulsa Eventos, the WiZink Center’s management company, who remember that this venue “is for a reason” at the moment the third in Europe and the fifth in the world by activity.
Saucedo points out that it is “unquestionable” that Barcelona led international live music in Spain years ago, although he maintains that “for years Madrid has been leading live music” despite acknowledging that the Spanish capital “does not have an Olympic stadium who is free all year when it comes to a stadium tour.
The reforms at the Bernabéu promise to make it more likely to host concerts
However, the balance in terms of availability could change for next year, in which the reforms of the Bernabéu promise to make it more likely to host concerts without damaging the field and the works of the Camp Nou will force Barça players to occupy the Olympic.
The proximity of Barcelona to the rest of Europe is also taken into account as a determining factor by Albert Salmerón, president of the Association of Musical Promoters (APM), who, although he points out that “most tours by small and medium-sized groups end up for both cities”, remember that “this changes in the big tours, where there are fewer dates and they try to make more profit”.
“These big tours have a limited period of two, three, four or five weeks in Europe, at most” -explains Salmerón-, which leaves available “a limited number of dates counting trips between cities, the assembly of infrastructures and that They have to visit X countries to go to the possible territory in their most important markets and others that they want to promote”.
However, as Grima points out, “many artists go to Portugal”, which makes Madrid a more comfortable and accessible destination: “People know that Spain is an important market and when they can get to Madrid, they try to get to Madrid ”, he resolves, thus ruling out any preference for a city over another unrelated to the commercial field.
Saucedo agrees with this, who considers it wrong to “deduce that Barcelona is above Madrid in terms of live music on major tours”, a fact that shows that the band U2 chose Madrid as the only Spanish city on its 2018 tour or the arrival in exclusive to Niall Horan’s capital next year.
Regarding the preferred musical styles in each place, Salmerón affirms that it is the promoter’s job and that he has “a good nose” in genres such as rock, which “has always thrown more” in Madrid.
This same market vision has led them to successfully test alternative destinations to the two large metropolises such as Seville, where tickets for Red Hot Chili Peppers (2022) sold faster than in Barcelona, Galicia or the Basque Country, they explain.