The Cowardice of Sónar
Asked to meaningfully engage with its own complicity in genocide and occupation, the esteemed Barcelona-based festival has chosen instead to hide behind empty platitudes.
Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez is no one’s definition of a radical, yet during a session of parliament last Wednesday, he for the first time referred to Israel as a “genocidal state.” Three days later, his government’s culture minister, Ernest Urtasun, commented to the press that KKR and other funds “that participate in the expansion of illegal settlements in Palestine” are “not welcome in Spain” and “not welcome in Spanish culture.”
Sónar, it seems, feels that kind of language is a little too strong.
Founded in 1994, the Barcelona festival has for decades been a reference event for the electronic music world, drawing both punters and industry types from around the globe. Sónar bills itself as “a proving ground for new and emerging trends at the intersection of performance, music, science, information technology and beyond,” and while its Barcelona edition remains the flagship event, offshoots of the festival have sprouted up over the years in places like Reykjavík, Buenos Aires, São Paulo, Santiago, Bogotá, Hong Kong, Istanbul and Lisbon. (Only the latter two remain active in 2025.)
As with many other music-related entities in recent years, Sónar’s prestige has made it an attractive property to investors, and in 2018, the festival was sold to Superstruct Entertainment, which at the time was owned by an investment firm called Providence Equity Partners. Since then, the UK-based company has reportedly amassed an international portfolio of approximately 80 large-scale festivals and 200 smaller events, including Field Day, Awakenings, DGTL and Mysteryland. The firm’s footprint is especially large in Spain, where aside from Sónar, it currently owns more than 20 festivals, including elrow, FIB, Monegros, Viña Rock, Resurrection Fest and Brunch Elektronik. (A lengthy, albeit incomplete, listing of Superstruct’s event network can be found here.)
Just days after the 2024 edition of Sónar, it was announced that Providence Equity Partners was selling Superstruct to an even larger investment firm, KKR, for a total of 1.3 billion euros. Considering that KKR’s total assets under management reached $638 billion at the end of 2024, Superstruct represents only a tiny fraction of the American firm’s overall portfolio. The rest of that portfolio, however, contains investments in a wide variety of businesses, many of them morally dubious; over the years, KKR has been tied to fossil fuel companies, weapons manufacturers, crowd-control technology, the building of a giant Israeli data center and an Israeli property management platform that allows the rental of properties in the illegally occupied West Bank.
The pushback against KKR’s entry into live music has been widespread in recent months, and grew particularly intense after streaming platform Boiler Room was sold by its previous owner, online ticketing platform DICE, to Superstruct at the beginning of 2025. In the face of intense and sustained criticism, Boiler Room in March released a statement that it “had no control over the sale” and was unable to disentangle itself from KKR because it had no longer had any say in its ownership. The company also promised to “adhere to BDS and PACBI guidelines,” a move that those organizations—part of the world’s largest Palestinian coalition—welcomed with a statement of their own, in which they called for “all other Superstruct-owned live music events to distance themselves from KKR’s investments in Israel’s complicit tech sector.”
Here in Spain, which last year became one of the first countries in the European Union to officially recognize the state of Palestine, it was only a matter of time before that call became piercingly loud. After a report by El Salto about KKR’s incursion into the Spanish festival market was published last week, dozens of artists publicly dropped out of events with ties to the investment fund, while BDS and PACBI, which had for weeks already been coordinating with Sónar artists and Barcelona-based organizations, specifically called for “escalating pressure” on the festival. That call was then echoed by an open letter from more than 70 Sónar artists past and present (the number of signatures has since ballooned to more than 140), asking that Sónar meet four specific demands:
Distance itself from KKR’s complicit investments
Adopt ethical programming and partnership policies
Respect BDS guidelines
Engage with artists on all the above
Even before that open letter was made public, Sónar had attempted to stem the tide of KKR-related criticism with a statement affirming the festival’s commitment to diversity, inclusion, freedom of expression and universal human rights. But despite its empathetic tone and use of progressive-coded language, the statement ultimately only served to inflame the situation further, with critics quickly pointing out that Sónar had neglected to even mention KKR, Israel, Palestine or the festival’s existing partnerships with Coca-Cola and McDonald’s, two priority targets on the BDS boycott list.
In the days that followed, the list of cancellations grew, and now includes artists like Juliana Huxtable, Bill Kouligas, Animistic Beliefs and Sega Bodega, although the latter rather conveniently claimed that he’ll be recovering from a planned surgery on the date of the festival. Meanwhile, acts like Arca, Tim Reaper, Safety Trance and Peder Mannerfelt signed on to the open letter, as did a litany of Sónar performers from previous years, including Kode9, Call Super, Fever Ray, Olof Dreijer, Aïsha Devi, Ikonika, Objekt and Loraine James.
With the pressure mounting, Sónar yesterday released a second statement, this time acknowledging the KKR-sized elephant in the room while also making reference to what it described as the “grave humanitarian situation” and “ongoing humanitarian catastrophe” in Gaza. What wasn’t mentioned, however, were the demands outlined in the aforementioned open letter. As of today, the festival’s partnerships with Coca-Cola and McDonald’s remain intact, and Sónar has not only made no public mention of BDS or PACBI, but completely refused to engage with those organizations. It’s also telling that despite the pointed language used by the Spanish government in recent days, the festival’s organizers were not inclined to describe what’s happening in Gaza as a genocide, or even mention the word Israel. (Not surprisingly, PACBI has declared Sónar’s latest statement to be insufficient, making clear that the festival’s distancing of itself from KKR is only a “first step to addressing its involuntary complicity.”)
I’ve written before that First Floor is not a political publication, and as a general rule, the idea that artists, festivals and other entities in the music world ought to be speaking out, let alone listened to, when it comes to sociopolitical and geopolitical matters is something I regard with a high degree of skepticism. Perhaps what I’ve written today will contradict that stance in the eyes of some readers, but regardless of how one feels about what’s going on in Gaza and the larger question of Palestine, it seems clear that Sónar’s course of action is emblematic of a different problem, one that I do feel qualified to speak on: the endless intrusion of corporations and investment capital into culture.
Having already written at length about this phenomenon just last week, I’m loath to repeat myself, but Sónar’s response to the situation specifically smacks of corporate crisis management. It’s likely not a coincidence that when Sónar yesterday released its most recent public statement, at least five other Superstruct-owned festivals in The Netherlands—DGTL, Mysteryland, Milkshake, Amsterdam Open Air and Vunzige Deuntjes—all simultaneously published their own, nearly identical “statements on ownership.” (While it’s not known what exactly went down behind the scenes, the coordinated timing and language across these statements leads one to believe that they were issued with the blessing of Superstruct and / or KKR.) All of the festivals asserted their commitment to progressive values and sought to create distance between themselves and KKR, yet not one of them committed to BDS guidelines, or even acknowledged the organization’s existence.
How is it that Boiler Room, one of the most widely and consistently criticized entities in all of dance music, is outpacing these festivals when it comes to seriously reckoning with their involuntary complicity in genocide, illegal occupation, environmental destruction and all sorts of other stomach-turning activity? It takes a special kind of arrogance for people to publicly state their concern about Palestine, and then refuse the guidelines offered by BDS, which is not only the world’s largest Palestinian coalition, but an organization that has spent two decades employing nonviolent tactics specifically inspired by the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa.
Sónar, for its part, had very little to lose by taking a more assertive stance on Gaza and engaging directly with BDS. Support for the Palestinian cause is sky high in Spain, and while adopting BDS guidelines was never going to appease everyone—as long as the festival is ultimately owned by KKR, some people will understandably continue to call for a total boycott—it would have at least represented a good-faith effort to follow the lead of actual Palestinians. Unfortunately, it appears that acting in good faith wasn’t on Sónar’s priority list. As reported by El País, one of the festival’s co-founders, Enric Palau, yesterday met with local Barcelona artists who’d been collaborating with BDS. Yet before the meeting had even concluded, Sónar released its most recent statement, making clear that the festival had no real interest in taking on board what either the artists or BDS had to say.
This is what cowardice looks like. This is what a multimillion-dollar operation—one, it bears mentioning, that has also received millions and millions of euros of public funding from the governments of Spain, Catalunya, Barcelona, L’Hospitalet and the European Union—protecting its investments looks like. What’s happened with Sónar isn’t a unique story, but given the festival’s influential position, not just in Spain, but within the wider electronic music landscape, its spineless course of action is profoundly disappointing.
In the interest of full disclosure, I need to mention that my wife Dania was scheduled to play live at Sónar this year, for the first time ever. For those who don’t know, Dania was born in Iraq, and only wound up in the West after her family fled the Iran-Iraq War during the 1980s. Aside from making music, she also works as an emergency doctor in remote areas of Australia, where many of her patients are First Nations Australians. Much of her existence is rooted in notions of land rights and human rights, and the show she was set to debut, replica - relic, is focused on the idea of forcing legacy institutions to decolonize themselves, taking specific aim at The British Museum and its trove of pilfered artifacts from around the globe. During a time when Sónar is publicly claiming “solidarity with the Palestinian civilian population in Gaza,” Dania was one of only a handful of Arab artists on the line-up, and someone whose work directly addresses the “suffering of thousands of innocent people who endure the cruelty of war, occupation, and genocide, as witnessed by the international community”—things which Sónar yesterday professed to deeply care about.
A few hours after Sónar released that statement, Dania withdrew from the festival.
More withdrawals are sure to come in the days ahead, especially if BDS calls for an official boycott of Sónar. (If that happens, it’ll be … interesting, to use a polite word, to see how artists justify their continued participation in the festival in the face of actual Palestinians telling them to do otherwise.) Here in Barcelona though, many acts have already decided that they’ve had enough, which is why the current cancellation list is stuffed with local names. Will out-of-town artists follow their lead? Maybe, but in a city where it already feels like every aspect of daily life is being constantly bought up, repackaged and resold to foreign investors and the unceasing throng of tourists, it’s not surprising that the Barcelona music scene isn’t swallowing Sónar’s expertly worded commitment to absolutely nothing of consequence.
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.