Live music in Spain took 807,202,623 euros in ticket sales during 2025, 11.24% more than in 2024. It is the fourth consecutive year of growth and the first time the sector has passed 800 million. Read in full, the Live Music Yearbook 2026 describes a far more uneven year than its own headline: two provinces account for almost all of the growth, seven territories took less than the year before, and the festival quarter fell.
The Yearbook (Anuario de la Música en Vivo) is published every year by the Association of Music Promoters (APM) and is the sector's reference document. The 2026 edition runs to 115 pages, attributes its tables to "APM and SGAE" and carries the revenue series back to 2015. Every figure in this article comes from there; the cross-checks and derived percentages are arithmetic on those same tables.
The record belongs to two provinces
The sector took in 81,592,950 euros more than in 2024: from 725,609,673 to 807,202,623. That is the whole of the year's growth. The useful question is where it came from.
Madrid went from 185,370,550 to 237,173,883 euros. That is 51,803,333 euros more, up 27.95%. Barcelona closed at 136,895,780 euros, up 20.62%, or 23,406,969 euros more.
Add the two together: 75,210,302 euros. Against national growth of 81,592,950, that is 92.2%. The remaining 7.8%, a little over six million euros net, is what the whole of the rest of the country contributes combined.
Madrid accounts for 29.38% of national revenue and Barcelona for 16.96%. Together, 46.3%; the Yearbook rounds it to "close to 50%".
The document itself puts Madrid's surge down to the big venues. It cites the Movistar Arena (Maluma, Young Miko, Myke Towers, Joaquín Sabina) and Iberdrola Music, home to Mad Cool for the past ten years. In Barcelona it points to Billie Eilish and Guns N' Roses, whose only stop was there.
Behind the top two, the scale collapses. Third is Seville, with 27,475,628 euros: 3.40% of the national total and -22.38% on 2024. Valencia, 26,888,210 (3.33%, +5.74%). Málaga, 25,891,052 (3.21%, +9.85%). Biscay, 25,802,724 (3.20%) with +35.49%, which the Yearbook highlights as the largest percentage change among the main provinces.
The operational reading is uncomfortable. If you book shows outside Madrid and Barcelona, the +11.24% does not describe your year: it describes someone else's. A national record is no argument for raising capacity, raising prices or taking on a bigger artist fee in Seville, Vigo or Palma. Your own province's numbers are, and in several of them they point the other way.
Ten years of data: money is moving four times faster than the audience
The Yearbook publishes the full revenue series since 2015, in millions of euros:
| Year | Revenue (€M) |
|---|---|
| 2015 | 194.5 |
| 2016 | 223.2 |
| 2017 | 269.2 |
| 2018 | 333.9 |
| 2019 | 382.6 |
| 2020 | 138.6 |
| 2021 | 157.6 |
| 2022 | 459.2 |
| 2023 | 579.0 |
| 2024 | 725.6 |
| 2025 | 807.2 |
The document labels four phases: "sustained growth" (2015-2019), "shock -63.8%" (2020), "recovery +191%" (2021-2022) and "maturity +11.24%" (2025). It talks of "professionalised stabilisation" and warns that "the normalisation of growth does not mean stagnation". That is defensible: growing 11% from 725 million is not growing 191% from 157.
What the Yearbook does not do is set that series against the audience figures. That is where its most awkward number lies. Between 2019 and 2024, the last two years with all three series complete, and we will see why shortly:
- Revenue: +89.7%
- Concerts: +32.3% (from 91,106 to 120,510)
- Spectators: +20.2% (from 28,243,877 to 33,954,503)
Money is growing more than four times faster than people. As a ratio: 13.55 euros of revenue per spectator in 2019 and 21.37 in 2024, up 58% in five years.
A caveat is due, and it is not a formality. That is not the average ticket price. It is the ratio of two series the Yearbook publishes side by side with the same attribution (APM and SGAE), but without stating that they cover exactly the same universe of events. The Yearbook publishes no average price and that ratio does not appear in the document: we calculated it. With that caution, it marks a clear direction: average takings per attendee are rising much faster than the number of attendees.
That direction explains a good deal of the recent regulatory noise. The price of live music is now a matter of public debate, from the CPI-indexed resale cap that the CNMC has asked to be qualified to the limits on dynamic pricing in the sustainable consumption law.
The year did not grow in summer
The Yearbook's monthly table is the one that does most damage to the headline.
| Month | 2024 € | 2025 € | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| January | 21,478,921 | 23,236,253 | +8.18% |
| February | 33,982,098 | 30,628,229 | -9.87% |
| March | 42,156,734 | 87,584,095 | +107.76% |
| April | 37,718,613 | 42,435,926 | +12.51% |
| May | 26,388,995 | 35,104,436 | +33.03% |
| June | 75,342,241 | 60,625,311 | -19.53% |
| July | 110,557,115 | 119,884,681 | +8.44% |
| August | 66,020,010 | 42,155,629 | -36.15% |
| September | 68,763,089 | 72,881,979 | +5.99% |
| October | 76,883,558 | 96,394,627 | +25.38% |
| November | 69,234,067 | 88,487,806 | +27.81% |
| December | 97,084,234 | 107,783,651 | +11.02% |
June falls 19.53%. August falls 36.15%. The festival quarter, June, July and August, goes from 251,919,366 to 222,665,621 euros: -11.6% in a year that closed 11.24% up. Only July's +8.44% keeps the slump from being worse.
So where was the record made? In March, which more than doubles (+107.76%, from 42.2 to 87.6 million). In October (+25.38%, to 96.4). In November (+27.81%, to 88.5). And in December, which rises 11.02% and closes at 107.8.
July is still the biggest month of the year at 119.9 million, but December (107.8) and October (96.4) are now close behind. The season's curve is flattening: the summer peak is losing relative height and autumn is gaining weight.
That touches two decisions. The sales window: if the competition for attention is no longer concentrated in June, the inherited on-sale calendar stops making sense. And price: a season with two peaks forces a review of when to open a new tier and when to hold, something managed with dynamic pricing rules defined in advance, not with last year's rate card.
An honest caveat: the Yearbook does not explain why June and August fell. A cancelled edition or a change of date shifts millions from one month to another without the audience changing its mind. What can be said is what the numbers say: 2025's growth did not come from the summer. And summer is also the quarter under the most regulatory scrutiny: witness the 320,000 euro fine handed to the promoter of the Reggaeton Beach Festival.
Seven territories took less than in 2024
Of the eighteen territories the Yearbook covers, seven closed below the previous year:
| Territory | 2024 € | 2025 € | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Castilla-La Mancha | 19,598,077 | 14,270,135 | -27.19% |
| Galicia | 36,038,359 | 30,438,763 | -15.54% |
| Ceuta and Melilla | 612,303 | 542,352 | -11.42% |
| Canary Islands | 35,048,832 | 31,572,398 | -9.92% |
| Balearic Islands | 21,606,169 | 20,217,961 | -6.43% |
| Andalusia | 116,157,215 | 108,736,131 | -6.39% |
| Valencian Community | 48,465,425 | 46,455,057 | -4.15% |
Andalusia is the case that weighs most: the country's third-largest region, with 13.47% of national revenue, gives up 7.4 million euros in a record year for the sector. Castilla-La Mancha loses more than a quarter of what it was taking. Galicia, almost 16%.
At the other extreme, the Basque Country goes from 29,063,495 to 44,570,440 euros: +53.35%, the biggest percentage jump of any region. Navarre rises 34.52% (from 10,909,701 to 14,675,608). Cantabria, 20.93%. Aragon, 19.01%. Catalonia, 17.77%. La Rioja, 17.07%. Castile and León, 16.37%.
Madrid, Catalonia and Andalusia add up to 63.1% of the total: 29.38%, 20.22% and 13.47%. Almost two thirds of the sector's money fits in three regions, and one of the three fell.
What matters to a promoter is not the ranking, it is the variance. In the same year and the same context, one region rises 53% and another falls 27%. That is not "the market": it is tour calendars, venue availability and the decisions of a handful of players. A sales forecast built on the national average rests on a number that almost no territory actually experienced.
This is box-office revenue, not margin
The Yearbook measures what comes in through ticket sales. It does not measure what is left. That is the distinction lost every time the headline does the rounds: a record box-office year is compatible with a hard year for an individual promoter, because between gross and the year's result sit artist fees, production, security, insurance and the cost of fronting all of that months before getting paid.
The Yearbook itself acknowledges this. It includes a piece by Fran González, editorial adviser, titled "¿Cuánto cuesta emocionarse?" ("How much does it cost to be moved?"), in which he argues that "live music has never taken so much, nor has it ever cost us so much" and describes promoters who have "renegotiated fees, squeezed margins, trimmed productions and taken on financial risk", as well as festivals "that have held back price rises at the expense of their profitability".
The record figure and the testimony of margins under pressure sit side by side in the same document. It is not a contradiction: it is the difference between revenue and result. If the 807 million figure is any use to you, let it be as a reference for demand. Not as a mirror of your profit and loss account.
The two TOP10s mix two different businesses
The Yearbook publishes two rankings of ticket sales on Spanish soil. This is the one for domestic artists:
| # | Artist | Concerts | Attendees | Promoter |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Joaquín Sabina | 41 | 383,633 | The Project, Get In, Riff |
| 2 | Manuel Carrasco | 31 | 367,256 | Riff |
| 3 | Antonio Orozco | 32 | 170,378 | Clipper's Music Group |
| 4 | Aitana | 3 | 153,198 | GTS, Clipper's Music Group |
| 5 | Dellafuente | 2 | 117,630 | No Faavors |
| 6 | Arde Bogotá | 7 | 115,249 | Raw Music, Crash Music and others |
| 7 | Lola Índigo | 3 | 109,253 | GTS, Clipper's Music Group |
| 8 | Fito & Fitipaldis | 10 | 92,727 | Live Nation |
| 9 | Rels B | 5 | 84,292 | Live Nation, Dale Play Live |
| 10 | Cano | 8 | 75,352 | The Project, The Music Republic and others |
And this is the international one:
| # | Artist | Concerts | Attendees |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Ed Sheeran | 2 | 137,884 |
| 2 | Imagine Dragons | 2 | 112,419 |
| 3 | AC/DC | 2 | 103,946 |
| 4 | Chayanne | 9 | 97,446 |
| 5 | Bruce Springsteen | 2 | 77,865 |
| 6 | Duki | 6 | 74,593 |
| 7 | Rauw Alejandro | 5 | 72,789 |
| 8 | Radiohead | 4 | 67,095 |
| 9 | Sebastián Yatra | 13 | 64,881 |
| 10 | Maluma | 4 | 59,621 |
Sabina's tour, 'Hola y Adiós', was his farewell: 41 concerts in 18 Spanish cities, plus 37 in the Americas, with the final date at Madrid's Movistar Arena. Aitana is the first woman in the domestic ranking. Chayanne, the first Latin artist in the international one. Ed Sheeran's two concerts were at the Riyadh Air Metropolitano stadium in Madrid.
Now divide attendees by concerts and what the list hides comes into view. Ed Sheeran: 68,942 people per concert. Dellafuente: 58,815. Aitana: 51,066. Lola Índigo: 36,418. On the other side, Chayanne: 10,827. Sabina: 9,357. Fito & Fitipaldis: 9,273. Sebastián Yatra: 4,991.
These are two different businesses sorted in the same column. Dellafuente sold more tickets with 2 concerts than Fito & Fitipaldis did with 10. Sebastián Yatra needed 13 dates to sell 64,881 tickets; Maluma sold 59,621 in 4. Sorting by tickets sold rewards the stadium and makes the long club-and-theatre tour invisible, which is where most of the sector lives.
It is not a calculation error, it is a sorting criterion. But it is worth knowing before using these lists as a benchmark. If your business is 30 dates of 1,500 people, none of these twenty names describes your problem.
A ranking you have to sign up for
There is a second thing to read before treating the TOP10s as a snapshot of the market. The Yearbook explains its own criterion:
"The ticket-sales TOP 10 gives visibility to the 10 artists or bands that sold the most tickets in Spain during 2025 and that have submitted the corresponding reports and certificates to be audited by APM's technical secretariat."
The key phrase is the second half. It is a self-declared ranking: whoever sends in the paperwork gets in. It is not a census of the market, and APM itself does not claim it to be one.
This implies nothing about anyone. It is a limitation the document spells out in full, and that is why it needs saying whenever those lists are cited as the complete map of the year. What the TOP10 measures precisely is who sold most among those who submitted to the audit.
Where electronic music is
No table in the Yearbook breaks revenue down by musical genre: not the national one, not the regional one, not the monthly one. And the two TOP10s contain not a single electronic artist. Combined with the self-declared criterion from the previous section, the club is doubly out of focus: it is not broken out and it is not declared.
This is not a reproach to the Yearbook: it measures the whole sector, does it well, and a breakdown by genre is not its brief. But the practical result is that today there is no public source answering the questions anyone booking electronic music asks every day: how much clubbing weighs against concerts, how a club night's takings behave compared with a festival's, how much is advance sales and how much is walk-up.
The figure missing this year
And here comes the finding that says most about the state of the sector. Since 2015 the Yearbook has kept a table with three columns: concerts, spectators and APM members.
| Year | Concerts | Spectators | APM members |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2019 | 91,106 | 28,243,877 | 77 |
| 2020 | 45,306 | 7,384,637 | 82 |
| 2021 | 64,682 | 11,770,169 | 82 |
| 2022 | 97,948 | 24,900,000 | 82 |
| 2023 | 110,192 | 28,340,000 | 87 |
| 2024 | 120,510 | 33,954,503 | 99 |
| 2025 | — | — | 103 |
The 2025 row is empty for concerts and spectators. The Yearbook publishes only the number of members: 103.
Put another way: the year being sold as a record is the first in the series for which there is no way of knowing how many people went, or to how many concerts. We know to the euro how much money came in, 807,202,623, and not how many people to divide it by.
That disables the document's most useful comparison. Without spectators there is no revenue per attendee for 2025, and without that there is no telling whether the sector grew because more people went or because each attendee paid more. Between 2019 and 2024 the answer was clear: the second weighed far more. Whether the trend continued in 2025 cannot be stated from this Yearbook, and it is precisely the question that matters most to anyone setting prices in 2026.
What to do with this
- Compare your year with your province, not with Spain. The national +11.24% is 92.2% Madrid and Barcelona. If you book in Andalusia, Galicia, the Canary Islands, the Balearic Islands, the Valencian Community or Castilla-La Mancha, your 2025 benchmark is negative.
- Look at how your revenue splits by quarter. If it is still concentrated in June to August, you are in the only block of the year that fell (-11.6%) while March, October and November grew by double digits.
- Work out your revenue per attendee for the last five years. It is your revenue divided by your real audience: the number the Yearbook no longer allows to be calculated at national scale for 2025.
- If you cite the TOP10 in a pitch, cite its criterion too. It is an audited list of those who sent in certificates, not a census. And two stadium concerts and a thirty-venue tour are not comparable even if they share a column.
An annual figure comes too late to act on
The underlying limitation is not APM's, it is the format's. A yearbook published in March with the previous year's data is an excellent photograph and a slow compass. By the time it arrives, the season is already closed and the dates committed.
The decisions that move the needle run at a different speed: when to go on sale, when to move to the next tier, whether to hold the price, whether to push communication in a city that is selling slowly. All of that is decided on last week's curve and needs sales metrics that are checked daily: pace per tier, conversion per channel, share of advance sales.
The Yearbook tells you which market you are in. Your own sales dashboard tells you what to do on Tuesday.
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Correction (14 August 2026). An earlier version of this article put Madrid's growth in 2025 at +29.95%. The correct figure is +27.95%, and it comes from dividing the Yearbook's own figures: €237,173,883 for 2025 by €185,370,550 for 2024. The wrong figure came from a press summary that we did not check against the original PDF. Corrected in the body, the quick answer and the FAQ.