The SGAE Foundation has presented at its headquarters in Madrid the SGAE Yearbook of the Performing Artswhich collects the main statistics of the cultural sector and consumption habits in Spain, in this case during the year 2023. They have been in charge of making the main conclusions known Juan José Solana, and Rubén Gutiérrez del Castillopresident and general director of the organization. In a complex general context, the live music and recorded music industries offer very encouraging indicators.
According to the study, little by little the different cultural industries are getting closer to the turnover they had before the pandemic, but as a whole they are still far from the numbers of 2019. Last year, live arts grossed 23 percent more than in 2022. However, according to the yearbook, only pop concerts exceeded the indicators before the health crisis that so seriously affected Culture. In this economic reality, large music festivals had a key impact.
In a context in which classical music, cinema and the performing arts continue to below their 2019 grosses and radio and television consumption falls to historic lows since 2008, the drawing power of festivals has been key.
“It is an idyll with the young public that demands this activity. Public policies (such as the youth cultural bonus) have stimulated and consolidated this habit of cultural consumption,” explained the general director of the SGAE Foundation. Last year, more than six and a half million spectators attended the festivals.
In addition, the yearbook records no less than 110,192 popular music concerts held in 2023, 12.5 percent more than the previous year, attended by almost twenty-two million people. More than twenty-six percent were concentrated in Madrid and 22 percent in Andalusia. Madrid and Catalonia were the communities with the largest audience, with 4.2 and 4.14 million attendees respectively.
Income from the sale of concert tickets, including festivals, amounted to just over 573 million euros: 27 percent above 2022 and an impressive forty percent more than in 2019. Catalonia added 17.4 percent percent of the total, ahead of Madrid’s 16 percent.
The recorded music market also grew in 2023: the sum of the digital and physical market exceeded 465 million euros. Digital sales accounted for 86.7 percent of this figure, with an almost absolute predominance of streaming, which continues to rise. Meanwhile, the physical market grows 9.6 percent and recovers lost ground, with vinyl supporting sales. The venerable format generated sales of 35.19 million euros, almost twenty percent above 2022. At the same time, CD sales have stabilized, with a very slight drop of 1.3 percent.
Faced with these positive figures, classical music concerts and theater are finding it difficult to find and consolidate a new audience. Furthermore, both segments point out the reluctance of more mature audiences to return to shows of this type, as a consequence of the pandemic.
The SGAE Foundation report has analyzed more than 170,000 live shows in its twenty-fourth edition, and has become an essential tool to know in detail the health of the different cultural sectors in Spain.