Paying twice for the same person

There’s a line in Forbes Spain’s New Markets special on the festival industry that sums up the last decade’s shift better than any consulting report. It comes from Hugo Albornoz, of Superstruct: “We used to sell tickets and book a lineup; today we manage communities.”

Coming from him, it isn’t a marketing tagline. Superstruct runs 40 festivals and 110 events a year. When someone with that volume says their business has stopped being the box office and become the community, the rest of the report is worth reading closely.

I read it end to end, and there’s one part I disagree with. But before I get there, I have to admit the part I agree with is better argued than it usually is.

The machine the report describes actually works

The underlying diagnosis is solid, and the numbers back it up: €807.2 million in live music revenue in Spain during 2025, up 110% versus 2019 and five times the 2013 figure. The sector hasn’t just grown, it has changed shape. Albornoz describes the shift from a three-day event to “a platform that operates year-round,” something that “forces you to think of the festival as a continuous product, not a seasonal one.”

The most interesting part of the special is built on that idea, and it’s about data. Alberto Amaro, of 014 Media, explains the mechanics behind DataFest Media, the initiative launched together with Superstruct using data from more than 35 festivals in Spain: “basically, we turn the experience of being there, enjoying the music live, into very precise digital profiles.” And he adds the distinction I think is the single most valuable line in the whole document: “it’s not the same to target someone who seems interested in music based on their digital behavior as it is to target someone who actually bought a ticket.”

That’s the whole thing, right there. The gap between inferred interest and real behavior is the gap between assuming and knowing. Amaro drives it home: “the real value lies in matching the physical world with the digital one.”

Then the report explains what’s done with that data, and that’s where my disagreement starts: digital campaigns on Meta, TikTok, Google, Spotify and programmatic environments, built on audiences drawn from real attendees.

In other words, the loop takes information from people who already paid to be there and hands it back to the platforms to buy reach all over again.

Before I go on, the answer a promoter would give me

Whenever I’ve raised this in conversations with people in the industry, the answer is always the same, and it’s a good one. I’ll reproduce it as it was given to me, because it deserves to be in the body of the text, not a footnote.

They rent the reach because the numbers work.

A promoter running three events a year with six people in the office puts €8,000 into Meta on a Tuesday and knows by Friday whether it sold. They don’t have two seasons to build a relationship: they have a venue to fill in eight weeks and a cash position that depends on the box office coming in. The expensive part isn’t the CPM. The expensive part is waiting.

There’s also a common misunderstanding about why you’d upload your own database to an ad platform in the first place. You don’t do it to hit your own people again. You do it so the platform can find people who look like them. The 20,000 buyers you already have aren’t your growth problem, they’re the seed. The problem is the 200,000 who don’t know you yet, and you don’t reach them by emailing your list. The money that looks wasted from the outside is, in many cases, the only thing that grows the venue.

And a third objection, the hardest one for me to argue against: talking directly to your audience isn’t free. It’s someone writing every week, building segments, managing unsubscribes and consent, and watching deliverability. That person costs more per year than the campaign does. It never shows up on a Meta invoice, but it’s paid through payroll.

On top of that, the report itself points to something worth noting. Among the sources through which an attendee discovers an event are artists’ own channels and ads, plus newsletters and direct communications from ticketing platforms. Audience loyalty belongs to the artist, and the direct channel that already works is usually someone else’s. Asking a mid-sized promoter to behave like a media brand twelve months a year is asking them to compete for attention they have no natural claim to. Brunch Electronik can do it. Sónar can do it. A two-day festival in a provincial city, run by six people, is nobody in November.

All of that is true. And I still think the conclusion drawn from it is wrong.

The question isn’t the first attendee, it’s the fifth

Nobody disputes the first purchase. To reach someone who doesn’t know you, paid advertising is the tool, and there’s no realistic alternative: the report notes that 46% of brands increased their live-event spend versus 2024, and money goes where it works.

The real discussion is different. The problem isn’t how much it costs to acquire someone the first time. It’s how much it costs to acquire the same person the fifth time. If every edition pays full price to re-reach an audience that has already bought two, three or four times, what’s being bought isn’t growth: it’s repeating the introduction to someone who already knew you.

And this isn’t just my hunch, it’s in the report itself, stated with some insistence. Marc Muñoz, of Brunch Electronik, says that “what matters isn’t only how many people show up, but how many want to come back,” and gives his own number: 48% new buyers, which read the other way round means more than half of his audience repeats. Albornoz talks about having “a loyal, recurring community” as the moment when “you stop being just an event organizer.” And when Superstruct describes its audience, it doesn’t give one number, it gives a ladder: 3.5 million direct customers, 9 million total audience and up to 12 million interested people.

That ladder is the key, and the order in which they list it isn’t an accident either. Those three rungs aren’t worth the same, and they don’t cost the same to reach. Treating them the same way, buying undifferentiated reach for all three, is the most expensive way to fill a venue.

DataFest Media’s stated goal, according to the report itself, is that “brands can keep talking to that audience intelligently long after” the festival ends. That strikes me as an excellent definition. I’ll just point out who the subject of that sentence is. Brands.

What the report doesn’t answer

The special describes the top of the pyramid. Superstruct has its own owned-media platform, a partner like 014 Media, and processes for anonymization, hashing and data clean rooms. It’s a serious operation, with a team and a budget, and it works because its cost is split across 40 festivals. Split across three, it doesn’t hold up.

The promoter running three events a year doesn’t show up in the report, and by headcount they’re nearly the entire sector. The question left open, one I haven’t seen answered here or anywhere else, is what the small version of this looks like.

It isn’t building an owned-media platform. It also isn’t cutting ad spend, which would be bad advice. I think it starts with something more modest and considerably less glamorous: knowing what share of your audience is already recurring, and no longer paying discovery prices for that share. It’s a measurement question before it’s a channel question. If you don’t know how many of the people who came this year had also come the year before, you can’t know how much you’re overpaying, and no ad platform is going to hand you that number, because it isn’t theirs to give.

There’s one last data point from the Estudio Pulso worth keeping in mind before deciding the audience wants nothing to do with you outside the venue: 57% of attendees view brand presence at events positively. Not tolerate it, value it. 94% say music is an important part of their life and helps them regulate their emotions, and 88% say it’s part of their identity. Those people aren’t waiting to be left alone. They’re waiting for whatever reaches them to actually have something to do with them.

The promoter who tells me the numbers work out is right. They work out on the first sale. What almost nobody is calculating, not in this report and not in most offices in the sector, is what the second one costs.

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An opinion piece on Forbes Spain’s New Markets special (September 2026). Read the full report here. I write this from inside a company that works in this space, so discount the bias accordingly: the lines that pushed me to write this aren’t mine, they belong to the people sitting on the other side of the table.