Sónar's Founders Sold Out—and Now They're Out of the Festival Entirely
Adding to an already tumultuous year, the long-running Barcelona event is suddenly getting new leadership—and highlighting the risks of culture engaging with investment capital.
Last Friday, Catalan newspaper La Vanguardia broke the news that the three founders of Sónar, Enric Palau, Ricard Robles and Sergio Caballero, had completely disconnected themselves from the Barcelona-based festival they’d first launched in 1994. A fourth partner, Ventura Barba, who joined the team in 2009, will be following them out the door at the end of the year, but in the meantime, he’s been tasked with easing the transition to the festival’s newly named CEO, François Jozic, a Belgian who’s currently the CEO of Centris Events, which oversees Brunch Electronik, Off Sónar, Hivernacle and Re-Cup Europe.
In a brief statement that was sent to Spanish press outlets, Palau, Robles, Caballero and Barba shared little in the way of additional details, opting instead to say that “everything that Sónar has achieved over the years has been possible thanks to the talent and dedication of creative communities that have accompanied the festival, the human team that have pushed the project forward with passion, the city of Barcelona that has welcomed and inspired us, and the loyal public that has supported us year after year.”
That support, however, took a major hit this year as the public became aware of Sónar’s financial ties to KKR—a US-based, pro-Israel private equity giant with documented connections to fossil fuel extraction, weapons manufacturing, crowd-control technology and businesses that operate in the occupied West Bank.1 Against the backdrop of genocide and starvation in Gaza, the involvement of KKR in one of Barcelona’s signature festivals, even tangentially, provoked widespread outrage and consternation, eventually prompting an official BDS boycott and more than 50 artists and collectives to remove themselves from the line-up.
Despite the outcry, Sónar claimed that this year’s edition attracted record attendance of 161,000 people,2 and in the months since the festival ended, public communications have been kept to a relative minimum. Even after the news of their departure broke, Palau, Robles, Caballero and Barba have all neglected to respond to further press inquiries, and while assembling this article, I myself contacted four additional members of the current Sónar staff, all of whom either didn’t reply or declined to comment.
It’s possible that this silence has been mandated from above. Despite Sónar’s repeated claims that it has no communication with KKR, no such statement has been made about the festival’s direct owner, Superstruct Entertainment, which appears to have given strict marching orders to all of the events in its portfolio about what can—and, more importantly, cannot—be said publicly.3
In fact, an unnamed source at Superstruct has so far provided the only additional communication about the change in Sónar leadership, telling La Vanguardia that the festival’s founders “leave behind an extraordinary legacy that we’re going to protect and take care of with the whole team. The essence of Sónar is not going to change. Nothing is going to change.” The same source also spoke of an “orderly and cordial transition,” framing the shake-up as something that was planned all along: “It had already been agreed with the founders, when Superstruct made the purchase, that at some point there would be a transition, a generational handover. They themselves had already said in interviews that they had brought younger people onto the festival team.”
It’s true that Palau, in a pre-festival interview with La Vanguardia, spoke of a desire to “secure and preserve the continuity” of Sónar, and said that the project needed to “continue beyond its founding members.” But considering that he also spoke of a desire to return the festival to America4 and commented on the venue-related challenges he was anticipating in 2026 (when Sónar’s usual daytime venue will not be available), it’s fair to assume that he wasn’t intending to walk out the door less than four months later.
Regardless of whether Palau and his partners chose to leave, were forced out or simply didn’t have their contracts renewed, Sónar is now in the hands of new leadership, which has been hand-selected by Superstruct. And considering that Brunch Electronik—which Superstruct acquired in 2023—has to date engaged in very little public pushback against KKR,5 there’s a good chance that its CEO and co-founder, François Jozic, was seen as a safe, unproblematic pair of hands who could not only lead Sónar into the future, but wouldn’t be tempted to kowtow to Palestinian activists and online discourse.
Another part of Jozic’s perceived suitability likely also stems from Brunch Electronik’s approach to curation and programming, which historically has been both more commercial and far less adventurous than that of Sónar.6 Skewing heavily toward Ibiza-style house and techno, this year’s Brunch Electronik festival in Barcelona, for instance, featured artists like Loco Dice, Maceo Plex, Nina Kraviz, Folamour, Marlon Hoffstadt and a slew of other similarly marketable acts. In fairness, many of those names have also appeared at Sónar at one point or another, but they were scattered among line-ups that included the likes of Aphex Twin, Kode9, Ryoji Ikeda, Oneohtrix Point Never and countless other figures who deal in more avant-garde fare. Although Sónar over the years has undoubtedly (and somewhat awkwardly) expanded its musical offerings beyond that core sound, its aesthetic and spirit has remained firmly rooted in boundary-pushing—and, in some cases, outright challenging—electronic music. Brunch Electronik follows a much different script, and frankly, its team doesn’t seem interested in challenging much of anything.
Only time will tell if Jozic brings that same approach to Sónar, but given that his track record flies in the face of nearly everything the festival is supposedly all about, the eulogies are already starting to roll in. Over the weekend, La Vanguardia published a second article, one in which various figures from the local music and culture sector reminisced about the festival’s glory days, lionized its founders and openly worried about its future. Barcelona-based writer Frankie Pizá took a significantly harder line in his own multi-panel Instagram post, lamenting that all that’s left of Sónar is “pure performance, operational protocols and probably the scaling up of projects. Institutional language can talk about ‘generational handover,’ but the truth is something else entirely: Sónar completes its capture by the financial market and its link (real, organic, conversational) with the cultural ecosystem disappears.”
Between the leadership change and the festival’s continued ties to KKR, Sónar faces a decidedly uphill battle, particularly when it comes to regaining the trust of electronic music’s more thoughtful and politically engaged corners. The ongoing animus toward Boiler Room, even after the company publicly pledged to adhere to BDS and PACBI (Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel) guidelines, has driven numerous artists and fans away from the platform, and that trend will likely carry over to Sónar, especially once the festival begins to unveil its 2026 line-up. (That being said, if the current ceasefire in Gaza holds and the situation there gradually fades out of the daily news cycle, there’s a non-zero chance that many people in electronic music will quietly set aside their aversion to all things KKR. Ethical consistency has never been the genre’s strong suit.)
Whatever happens with Sónar, the festival at the very least ought to serve as a cautionary tale about the dangers of engaging with investment capital, particularly when that engagement requires the surrender of autonomy over one’s own work. Palau, Robles and Caballero poured more than three decades of their lives into Sónar, and though they built something that became both a global reference point for the electronic music community and an immense source of pride for the city of Barcelona, their journey with the festival has now come to a rather ignominious end.
What’s worse, they themselves are ultimately to blame.
Sónar’s communications this year repeatedly framed the festival as an unwitting and involuntarily accomplice to KKR and its nefarious business practices, but that victimization narrative was disingenuous at best. In 2018, Sónar’s founders voluntarily sold a controlling interest in the festival to Superstruct, and while the terms of that sale have never been made public, one can only assume that they were paid handsomely. KKR wasn’t in the picture yet, but unless they were incredibly naive, the fact that Superstruct was founded by James Barton, a former executive at Live Nation (an American entertainment conglomerate that’s widely recognized as one of the most ruthlessly profit-seeking and monopolizing forces in the entire music industry), should have been a giant red flag.
Though the sale did apparently leave Palau, Robles, Caballero and Barba in charge of running Sónar on a day-to-day basis,7 the events of this year made clear that they weren’t really the bosses anymore. When crisis struck, the decision-making responsibility belonged to Superstruct, an entity that in recent years has proven itself to be far more interested in expansion, acquisition and driving up its market value than preserving legacies, platforming interesting artists or maintaining Sonar’s stated commitment to “music, innovation and creativity.”
As Pizá stated in his examination of the situation, “External capital has to first be let in the door, and you have to accept living alongside it as the metastasis advances.” The cancer analogy, while extreme, is fitting, especially as corporate consolidation continues to creep across the music industry, imperiling the viability of independent music culture as it floods the market with a steady stream of homogenous, inoffensive and algorithm-approved content and experiences. Sónar may be the latest high-profile victim of that march, but it won’t be the last, and if those who claim to care about under-the-radar sounds and music that falls outside the mainstream don’t learn to A) recognize this trend more quickly and B) stand together against it, the cultural landscape will continue to deteriorate.
Even as the critiques of Sónar grew louder and louder during May and June, there was a vocal contingent of people, especially here in Barcelona, who clung on to nostalgia for the festival’s past and fought hard to preserve its legacy. Catalan producer / singer / pop star Alizzz, who decided to perform at this year’s edition, said in a statement—which he’s since deleted from his Instagram account—that he never considered canceling, explaining that “Sónar is part of our history and is crucial for this city, and I’m sure that for the sake of consistency they will make moves and change things.” Ironically, he was right, and though the changes probably weren’t what he expected (or wanted), there’s no erasing his decision to ignore the boycott, go on stage and soak up a huge round of applause when he said “Sónar is ours” and flashed the words “Delete KKR” on a giant screen during his set.
Plenty of other artists followed Alizzz’s lead, many of them incorporating Palestinian flags, keffiyehs and anti-KKR messaging into their Sónar performances. It’s easy to ridicule their actions as misguided or incoherent, but those performances were only possible thanks to the complicity of audiences and industry professionals alike, most of whom presumably decided that they didn’t care about the KKR issue, or simply didn’t care enough to alter their behavior. The festival itself did its best to provide them with moral cover, insisting over and over again that “Sónar will still be Sónar.” That claim may have been enough to salvage this year’s edition, but now that the founders have left the building, the notion that nothing significant has changed looks patently ridiculous.
At the end of the day, there is no negotiating with investment capital, and once it sinks its teeth into a cultural organization of any kind, the essence of that organization almost inevitably begins to evaporate. Perhaps Sonár’s founders thought they could buck that trend, or maybe they were simply caught flat-footed when the KKR protests reached a level of intensity they didn’t anticipate. Either way, their response, which began with stonewalling and eventually evolved into a series of limp and obviously reluctant attempts to stake out a muddled middle ground, satisfied neither the festival’s critics or its corporate overlords.
To steal another line from Pizá, the “passivity or ‘prudence’ [of Sónar] was in reality a functional part of the process of decomposition. Those who don’t take take a position end up obeying, and are then ‘positioned’ by whoever’s in charge.” Sónar’s founders could have acted boldly to support what the festival’s communications said was a “clear and unequivocal” condemnation of the genocide, following the lead of the teams at Boiler Room and Mighty Hoopla who reportedly spoke out in direct defiance of their bosses at Superstruct. Instead, they adopted a defensive crouch and tried to play it safe, and while that perhaps seemed wise in the moment, the decision still cost them a significant chunk of their integrity—and now, their jobs.
Their ability to read the room, it seems, wasn’t where it needed to be.
Back in June, in the middle of this year’s festival, co-founder Enric Palau had a conversation with Jacinto Antón, a veteran culture journalist and longtime editor at El País, the largest newspaper in Spain. Deviating from the contrite, damage-control-oriented interviews he’d granted in the days prior, Palau seems to have opened up to Antón, and while the article recounting their discussion didn’t include any exact quotes,8 the Sónar co-founder did apparently remark that he didn’t think the festival deserved all of the criticism that had been thrown its way. He also told Antón that he thought dark and murky forces had intentionally tried to harm Sónar, an assertion that doesn’t sound great when one considers that BDS—arguably the largest Palestinian organization in the world—was the most prominent agitator of protests against the festival.
Both Antón and Palau are in their sixties, and it’s possible that their exchange was simply a snapshot of what happens when two out-of-touch old guys have a conversation about contemporary culture and geopolitics. But what’s interesting is that Palau wasn’t entirely off base. Dark and murky forces were harming the festival, but they weren’t Palestinian activists or followers of the BDS movement. They worked at the offices of Superstruct and KKR, and instead of standing up to them, he and his partners wound up doing their bidding.
As a reward, they’ve now lost control of their life’s work, but the news for Sónar’s founders isn’t all bad—they were able to stuff their pockets long before they walked out the door.
Shawn Reynaldo is a freelance writer, editor, presenter and project manager. Find him on LinkedIn and Instagram—and make sure to follow First Floor on Instagram as well—or you can just drop Shawn an email to get in touch about projects, collaborations or potential work opportunities.
Sónar was pulled into the KKR universe in 2024 when the investment firm—which literally counts retired US general and former CIA chief David Petraeus as a partner and the chairman of both its Global Institute and Middle East division—acquired Superstruct, a UK festival conglomerate with a portfolio that includes approximately 80 large-scale festivals (e.g. Sónar, Field Day, Awakenings, DGTL and Flow) and numerous other events around the globe. This past January, Superstruct also purchased Boiler Room, arguably the world’s most prominent streaming platform for dance music and DJ culture.
The veracity of that number is in question. As La Vanguardia pointed out in its story about the founders’ departure, Sónar did not do its usual end-of-the festival presentation and press conference this year, and an El País article added that it was not made clear whether the festival had subtracted all of the tickets that were refunded due to the KKR controversy.
During the run-up to the festival, Sónar attempted to placate critics by making a series of three separate public statements within a two-week period. The first two, which were primarily disseminated via social media, have since been deleted from Sónar’s Instagram account, though a copy of the second can still be found online. It’s telling that around the time that second statement was made, at least seven other Superstruct-owned festivals in The Netherlands—DGTL, Awakenings, Mysteryland, Milkshake, Vunzige Deuntjes, Zwarte Cross and Amsterdam Open Air—all published their own, nearly identical statements. (Amsterdam Open Air has since scrubbed the communication from its website.)
Satellite editions of Sónar have previously taken place in Colombia, Brazil, Argentina and Chile.
Following the lead of several other Superstruct-owned festivals and events, Brunch Electronik posted a statement addressing its ownership, one that reaffirmed the misleading narrative that “Superstruct Entertainment’s financial income is not, and will not be, distributed to its owners, including KKR.” That narrative, of course, conveniently ignores the very nature of investment and speculation; if Brunch Electronik, or any other Superstruct-owned property, does well and grows in value, that boosts the value of the company’s portfolio, which in turn boosts the value of KKR.
Though it was founded in Barcelona, where it oversees a year-round party series and an annual summer festival, Brunch Electronik is an expansive operation that’s also active in Algarve, Lisbon, Sao Paulo, Ibiza, Madrid, Malaga, Paris, Bordeaux and other cities across France. Just last month, it was reported by Catalan newspaper Crónica Global that Jozic’s former Brunch Electronik partner, Loïc Le Joliff, had been paid 11 million euros to finalize his departure from the company.
In his pre-festival interview with La Vanguardia, Palau claimed that their independence had been assured, and they were allowed to maintain control over the event’s artistic direction, management and accounting.
The article did, however, include a tasteless intifada joke, and a second Sónar article by Antón included racist remarks about Peggy Gou, who he described as a “mysterious and attractive Dragon Lady” and also compared to a “pirate queen of Malaysia” and an “Oriental madam of an opium den.” The fact that Antón is literally an award-winning journalist says a lot about the state of cultural criticism here in Spain.