Mad Cool broke a public record in its 2018 edition, when all its tickets were sold out: it reached 80,000 attendees daily. This year, the biggest music festival in Madrid aims to break another record, but with public funding: it asks the City Council of the capital and the Community of Madrid for a direct injection of four million euros per edition, over the next four years. That is, an agreement of 16 million euros to be executed between 2021 and 2025. This has been confirmed to this newspaper sources from the Consistory Culture area led by the popular José Luis Martínez-Almeida.

This would mean multiplying almost three times the public assistance that the macro festival already receives, which is currently one million euros per year by the City Council and 600,000 by the Community. Municipal aid was progressively increasing from half a million to one million in 2019, an amount that only exceeds 100,000 euros to the municipal aid that all concert halls in the capital receive, through a public tender.

Sources from the council of Andrea Levy say that this increase is "unassuming." "We can not spend that money in an event that lasts three days a year, no matter how much it contributes to the city, and that could be dedicated to improving the fabric of live music in the city," said sources of City Hall Culture.

The festival management, whose annual budget is close to 20 million euros, does not confirm this amount and prefers to point out that it is "working to find a new space for Mad Cool and a new economic formula", which serves to cover the "extra cost which will mean the change of location ”, according to its co-director, Farruco Castromán.

The festival has celebrated its last two editions in a space ceded by the City Council in Valdebebas, but that plot will not be available from 2021 -by the expansion of Ifema-, and that change has motivated the conflict between Mad Cool and the Consistory.

The festival minimized this conflict yesterday and avoided talking about an ultimatum or impending rupture. "We are optimistic in reaching an agreement," said Castromán. "We have a hundred percent confidence in the City Council, but we believe it is necessary to do a thorough job: break down the efforts of both parties, in order to continue as before," he concluded. That is, share the financial impact of the transfer. From Mad Cool they affirm that if the negotiation was broken -initiated four months ago- they will study «other proposals», but they clarify that until now they have only sat down to talk with the city that gives name to the festival.

Public differences between the festival and the City Council have caused other cities such as Valladolid and Arganda del Rey, both governed by the PSOE, to have shown interest in being the headquarters of Mad Cool, although none of its mayors have clarified whether they would be willing to approve a Direct grant of 16 million euros and offering the logistics facilities that Madrid has provided since 2016, when the first edition of the event was held.

The City Council supported, for example, the management of Mad Cool when in 2017 the acrobat Pedro Aunión died when he rushed into the void during his performance at the festival. And when on the first day of the 2018 edition there was a collapse in the accesses to the site, which motivated queues of several hours from the public, the Consistory urgently arranged a police support reinforcement for the following days.

The financial muscle behind Mad Cool is provided by Live Nation, the multinational that dominates the live music business worldwide. Several sources insist to this newspaper that after the festival's requirement to receive more public money there is a desire to make the brand profitable to try to find new capitalist partners, as Primavera Sound achieved in 2018: two years ago the Barcelona macro festival received an injection of US investment fund manager The Yucaipa Companies, which bought a stake in the event.

City Hall and Mad Cool are scheduled to meet this week with the countdown to reach an agreement during the month of February. According to the director of the festival, "the rush of time is due to the fact that the great concerts of 2020 are contracted now, and we need to have stability to be competitive with the rest of the great festivals in Europe."

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