Sonar Barcelona

History

Sonar started in Barcelona in June 1994, dreamed up by music journalist Ricard Robles alongside musicians and visual artists Enric Palau and Sergi Caballero. They called it a festival of "advanced music and multimedia art," and built it around a split that's defined it ever since: Sonar by Day, staged at the Centre de Cultura Contemporania de Barcelona (CCCB) for a crowd that could browse talks and installations between sets, and Sonar by Night, which opened at the Apolo club before moving to Poble Espanyol for its second and third editions. Around 6,000 people showed up for that first edition. Two years later, the number had tripled to 18,000.

The festival kept outgrowing its own venues through the rest of the 1990s. Sonar by Night relocated to the Mar Bella sports pavilion in 1997 to handle the crowds, and in the summer of 1998, in only its fourth year, the festival landed a booking that made the wider music press pay attention: Kraftwerk's first live performance in twelve years. By 2001, the night program had moved again, this time to the Fira Gran Via exhibition halls in L'Hospitalet de Llobregat, a shift that let Sonar start booking large-format concerts with real production behind them. Attendance kept climbing alongside the ambition, passing 53,000 by 2000.

Sonar by Day found its current home at Fira Montjuic, on Plaza d'Espanya, in 2013, the same year the festival launched Sonar+D, a three-day congress on music technology and creative industries that has since drawn in Spotify, Google, and MIT Media Lab, among others. The move coincided with a run of record attendance: 121,000 in 2013, climbing to 126,000 for the 25th anniversary in 2018, the same year Sonar transmitted a set of specially composed tracks toward the exoplanet GJ 273b, 12.4 light-years away, under the project name Sonar Calling GJ273b. If the message is ever answered, it's timed to arrive back around the festival's 50th anniversary in 2043. Over three decades, the bill has run from Bjork, the Chemical Brothers, and LCD Soundsystem to earlier-era bookings of Laurent Garnier, Sven Vath, Richie Hawtin, and Jeff Mills, who all played the festival's first few years.

The festival's ownership has shifted more recently, and messily. Superstruct Entertainment, the pan-European festival group, took a stake in Sonar in 2019 before KKR acquired Superstruct outright in a deal reported at roughly $1.3 billion in 2024. When KKR's ties to Israeli and defense-linked investments drew a boycott campaign across Superstruct's roster in 2025, Sonar was one of the properties forced to respond, issuing a statement of solidarity with Gaza's civilian population and distancing itself from KKR's actions, an episode covered in more detail in our reporting on the wider Boiler Room boycott. That October, Robles, Palau, and Caballero stepped away from the festival they'd built, after 32 years, with Superstruct executive Francois Jozic taking over as CEO. Sonar today runs sister editions in cities including Reykjavik, Istanbul, Hong Kong, Bogota, and Buenos Aires, but the flagship Barcelona weekend, split across its day and night halves, remains the reference point for all of them.

FAQ

What's the difference between Sonar by Day and Sonar by Night?

Sonar by Day runs at Fira Montjuic with a wider mix of stages, talks, and installations alongside the Sonar+D congress. Sonar by Night, held separately at Fira Gran Via in L'Hospitalet de Llobregat, is the large-scale club program built around headline electronic acts.

What is Sonar+D?

It's Sonar's music-technology and creative-industries congress, launched in 2013 and running alongside the festival with talks, exhibitions, and networking sessions that have drawn participants from Spotify, Google, and MIT Media Lab.

Has Sonar always been in Barcelona?

The flagship festival has, but Sonar has run international spin-off editions since expanding to London in 2002, with recurring versions since in Reykjavik, Istanbul, Hong Kong, and South American cities including Bogota, Buenos Aires, and Santiago.