Sonic Insights: Analyzing Spain's 2023 Music Festival Season

Music festivals are quickly becoming the music and lifestyle experience of choice; quickly outpacing the popularity of traditional concerts and visits to the nightclub. It is important for industry leaders to properly examine the commerce and consumption around these events, and to be critical of existing notions around music festival planning. I will be taking a dive into the 2023 calendar of mid to large-sized music festivals in Spain, which were compiled by Kaggle contributor Rubén Peinado, who generously scraped and validated 414 entries from https://fanmusicfest.com/, a Spanish landing page for various festivals across many genres. Through this macro-level view of the 2023 festival season, I plan to derive the following insights:   

• How are Spain’s festivals distributed across the country’s provinces?   
• Which genre of festival is the most popular in Spain?   
• How important is the relationship between season and genre in Spain’s festival scene?   
• Does genre determine where a festival will be held?   
• Who were the most booked artists of 2023 in Spain? 

Which Spanish Provinces Host the Most Festivals? 

Location, location, location is everything; especially for an event usually hosted outdoors with thousands of attendees. I anticipated most festivals would be held in Barcelona, the Balearic Islands, and Madrid; the usual suspects. I was in fact surprised to the sheer number of festivals on the northern coast of Spain, as well as the interior provinces. The provinces of Valencia and Málaga also put up some impressive numbers. The visualization below demonstrates my findings and is colored from light -> dark in accordance with the total yearly festival count of each province.  

What are the Most Popular Genres? 

Although the largest and most recognizable festivals in the world tend to have a wide array of artists that span a variety of musical styles, the mid-sized and smaller festivals, which are the most numerous, will focus on a single genre. In the dataset, I reviewed each festival lineup and assigned it to the most relevant genre based on artist lineup. Below we can see the distribution of values, with Rock being the clear winner, followed by Pop. 

Does Genre Effect Scheduling? 

It is understood that a festival producer would not want to schedule a festival during lousy weather, but music fans of different genres will show varying reactions to the weather. There also may be a correlation between smaller festivals and the ability to host indoors during the colder months. Here is an overview of the festival totals for each month collectively and broken down further into genre types. It is very important to note that this distribution is much more uniform than what would be observed in countries further to the north with a less moderate climate and a heavier reliance on the summer months.  

Insights 

It is clear that most festivals would take place during the summer months where most attendees would be enjoying the warmer weather and time off from work, but here are some interesting patterns per genre. 

• Electronic: An expected strong summer scheduling, with a solid reliance on spring break crowds during the March and April months. Pretty low activity after the new year. 
• Indie: A consistent schedule, most likely due to the smaller venues needed for the genre, which could take place partially or entirely indoors during the bad-weather months. 
• Latin/Reggaeton: This genre has a massive reliance on the summer months, this may be linked to the genre being viewed in wider popular culture as a “warm weather” genre. 
• Pop: A large spike in the summer months, as to be expected with the category of “Pop” being given to largest and most artistically diverse lineups. Think of the name brand festivals, and they would most likely be labeled as Pop. 
• Rock: This genre may be scheduled defined on the notion that fans and festival goers are much more willing to endure poor weather and be “tough”. This may be why we see so much consistent booking throughout the year. 

Genre Determining Location? 

Just as we saw the patterns of seasonality affecting the time that festivals of different genres were scheduled, we can most likely expect to see a similar correlation between geographical location and genre. Here is a geographical representation. 

Insights 

There are correlations in the data regarding location and genre types. Aside from the major cities expectedly hosting a wide range of festivals, geographical tendencies can be observed from the locations.  

• Electronic: Much of the modern electronic scene has been shaped by the iconic Spanish coastal events of the 90’s and 2000’s, so it is no surprise that the festivals tend to be located near the coast. I was surprised by the lack of activity in the Balearics, but this may be due to the clubs not listing the events as festivals. 
• Indie: A standard distribution across the country, nothing noticeably different. 
• Latin/Reggaeton: Like Electronic, we see a congregation towards the southern and eastern coasts. 
• Pop: Pop festivals tend to dominate the larger urban centers, where the peak demographic potential for large-scale festivals and crowds are located. 
• Rock: This genre may be the largest surprise, with the most festivals taking place in the interior of Spain. This may be due to Rock being more popular outside of city centers than other genres, and/or a willingness of fans to travel to more remote destinations. 

Most Booked Artist? 

Although the data collected does not include one-off shows or club appearances, it is safe to say that festival bookings are a decent metric to gauge the relative popularity of an artist within a certain demographic or location. The word cloud below (which only features artists who performed at least 6 times), is based on the parsing of lineups to see which artists were booked the most for Spanish festivals in 2023. The winner is Viva Suecia, with 23 total appearances.

 Conclusion

With 2023 being the first truly post-covid schedule where the planning and course of the festival season ran as expected, it was a pivotal one to determine the course of music festival scheduling for the years to come. Here are some key insights derived from this analysis on the 2023 Spanish Music Festival Season: 

• Most festivals in Spain occur in the provinces of: Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia, and Málaga. But it is important to note the increasing number of festivals being held in the north of Spain, particularly in the provinces of Asturias, Pontevedra, and Cantabria; which is impressive considering the worse weather than other regions. 
• The most popular genres in Spain were Rock and Pop, with the increasing streaming popularity of the Latin/Reggaeton genres filling up lineups in 2023. 
• Rock appears to be the most resilient festival genre throughout the seasons and holds steady in the more seasonal months where other genres may not book. Electronic and Indie show an impressive spring break scheduling dynamic, while Pop and Latin/Reggaeton are seldom booked outside of the summer months. 
• The genres of Electronic and Latin/Reggaeton congregate towards the coastal regions and islands, while Rock shows many festivals held in interior and sparsely populated areas. 
• The most booked artists tended to be classified as belonging to the Latin/Reggaeton styles, indicating a predictable tour season for artists of this genre.