Primavera Sound

Primavera Sound
Primavera Sound in 2019
Genre	Indie rock[1][2]
Dates	Late May-early June
Location(s)	Parc del Fòrum, Barcelona (2005–2019, 2022–present) Previous Poble Espanyol, Barcelona (2001–2004) International spin-offs For full list, see here
Coordinates	41°24′38″N 2°13′35″E / 41.410667°N 2.226333°E / 41.410667; 2.226333 41.410666, 2.226342
Years active	2001–2019; 2022–present
Founders	Pablo Soler
Attendance	220,000
Capacity	75,000[3]
Website	primaverasound.com

Primavera Sound (commonly referred to as Primavera) is an annual music festival held at the Parc del Fòrum in Barcelona, Spain, during late May and early June. It was founded in 2001 by Pablo Soler as "a showcase for Spanish noise bands", originally held at the Poble Espanyol before moving to the Parc del Fòrum, a much larger site on the seafront, in 2005.^[4] It is one of the largest and most-attended music festivals in Europe and the biggest in the Mediterranean.^[5]

The festival's image was originally oriented around indie rock, but in recent years has seen a larger presence of genres such as hip hop, electronic dance music and pop.^[6][7] In contrast to most other European festivals, traditionally the first bands go on at 4:00 pm, the headliners begin at midnight, and the latest acts play until 6:00 a.m.^[8][9] Beginning in 2019, Primavera Sound became the world's first major music festival to achieve gender-equal lineups under the tagline "The New Normal".^[10][11] It was also the first to use exclusively mobile tickets.^[12]

Originally a one-day event, a second day was added beginning in 2002, and the 2004 edition became the first to feature a three-day lineup. In 2008, the festival began hosting free shows for ticketholders in local venues across Barcelona, beginning a tradition now known as Primavera a la Ciutat.^[13] No festival was held in 2020 and 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. It returned in 2022 with a two-week format for the first time, combining most bookings from the missed years, before reverting to a one-week event in 2023.

The success of the festival led to an international expansion to Porto in 2012 at the Parque da Cidade, which takes place a week after the main edition.^[14] In 2022, the festival hosted its first editions in Los Angeles, Santiago de Chile, Buenos Aires and São Paulo.^{[15][16][17][18]} Primavera Sound continued to expand to Asunción in 2023.^[19] The festival held a 2023 edition in Madrid a week later featuring a nearly identical lineup, an experiment which only lasted one year.^[20][21]

The artists who have headlined the main Primavera Sound edition in Barcelona multiple times are Pulp, Sonic Youth, Wilco, Pixies, PJ Harvey, the Flaming Lips, Belle and Sebastian, My Bloody Valentine, the National, Patti Smith, Arcade Fire, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Interpol, Pavement, Tame Impala, the Strokes, Lorde, Phoenix, Blur, New Order, Kendrick Lamar, Rosalía and Justice.

Each Primavera Sound between 2009 and 2022 set new attendance records, growing from its small origins of just 7,700 tickets sold in 2001. The 2022 festival was visited by 460,500 people, the fourth-most attended music festival in the world that year, while generating €349 million in revenue for the city of Barcelona.^[22] The New York Times noted in 2014 that "the festival is sometimes called the Coachella of Europe", but without the "celebrity spotting" and "fashion and marketing trends" that the American festival is known for.^[23]