Blog – Manel González-Piñero

The festivalization of football

For decades, football seemed immune to the experience-economy logic already reshaping live music — Coachella, the Eras Tour, Live Nation. The 2026 World Cup — 104 matches, dynamic pricing, its own resale marketplace, commemorative rings, pitch grass sold as collectibles — proves otherwise. FIFA no longer sells football matches. It sells an entire ecosystem. The question left open: are ninety unpredictable minutes still enough to justify everything built around them?

19/07/2026

Sold out isn’t enough anymore

Thirty Spanish festivals folded this year while others sold out twice over, proof that the market isn’t shrinking, it’s splitting. The festivals that survive own their demand, through brand or community, while the ones that don’t are forced to rent it, year after year, at a price someone else sets.

12/07/2026

The age of discernment: What empty concert seats, premium burgers and Ticketmaster fees reveal about a cultural shift in consumption

Five Guys is closing stores in California while Ticketmaster shows visible empty seats at major concerts. Two unrelated industries, the same underlying signal: consumers are no longer paying for anything labeled premium, only for what still feels proportionate to its price.

18/05/2026

When football becomes cultural infrastructure

Barça won La Liga this weekend, but the more interesting victory happened off the pitch. Spotify used the match to launch a secret Olivia Rodrigo concert built entirely from listening data, revealing how football clubs are quietly becoming something bigger than sports institutions: cultural platforms.

11/05/2026

What is happening to culture through AI?

AI is usually described as a new tool for making culture. That framing may already be outdated. What is actually changing is the condition under which culture gets produced, valued and owned in the first place, and the question worth asking is no longer what AI can do for culture, but what culture is becoming through AI.

12/04/2026

Music passes $30 billion, powered by the rise of streaming

Global music revenue crossed $31.7 billion in 2025, a milestone usually credited entirely to streaming. The real story is less tidy: growth is concentrated in specific markets, and countries like Spain show that the challenge is no longer generating demand, but converting it into revenue.

31/03/2026

Listening for what comes next: Scenes to watch in 2026

By the time a new sound reaches the charts, the community that created it has usually moved on already. This piece maps five scenes, from genre-blurring Gen Z rap to accelerating hard techno, that are quietly shaping what the mainstream will sound like next.

06/03/2026

Why do we miss David Bowie so much after 10 years?

Ten years after his death, Bowie still feels less like a figure from the past and more like a voice we urgently need. He predicted streaming, the rise of touring economies and the collapse of distance between artist and audience decades before they became industry reality.

11/01/2026

What happens to music when anyone can create it?

Generative AI has made music creation nearly instantaneous, and technical skill is no longer scarce. What becomes scarce instead is meaning, identity and a reason for a piece of music to exist at all, which changes what actually makes a musician valuable.

23/12/2025

What Bad Bunny’s Puerto Rico residency tells us about the future of touring

Bad Bunny turned a 30-show residency in San Juan into economic redistribution for the island, not just a concert run. From Adele in Berlin to U2 at the Sphere, artists are increasingly choosing to stay in one place, and the reasons say a lot about where touring is heading.

08/10/2025

The best music release strategies for independent artists in 2025

Over 120,000 tracks are uploaded every day, more than existed in all of 1989. A practical guide to standing out anyway, from pre-release planning to the waterfall strategy that keeps momentum alive long after release day.

03/10/2025

K-pop and the superfan economy: Innovation by design, expansion by strategy

The top 1-5% of an artist’s audience can generate up to 40% of their revenue, and K-pop built an entire industry around that fact. How Weverse, lightsticks and transmedia storytelling turned fandom itself into infrastructure, and why the model is now being exported worldwide.

09/09/2025