{"id":18523,"date":"2021-07-26T17:34:46","date_gmt":"2021-07-26T15:34:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.auxsons.com\/?post_type=focus&p=18523"},"modified":"2021-07-26T17:34:46","modified_gmt":"2021-07-26T15:34:46","slug":"covid-and-the-cultural-crisis-in-barcelona","status":"publish","type":"focus","link":"https:\/\/www.auxsons.com\/en\/focus\/covid-and-the-cultural-crisis-in-barcelona\/","title":{"rendered":"Covid and the cultural crisis in Barcelona"},"content":{"rendered":"

When burgeoning Mellow Productions announced on 5th<\/sup> March that, due to the health crisis, it was cancelling the imminent launch of the Jazz Effusion<\/a> event, everyone said it was exaggerating. Ten days later Barcelona was in lockdown. And it was one of the harshest lockdowns in Europe.<\/strong><\/p>\n

One year on, Mellow is just one of the city\u2019s smaller music promoters unable to navigate the challenging waters of a cultural sector awash with uncertainty and insecurity.<\/p>\n

Looking back over 2020, the picture is bleak by any standards. At an industry level, ticket sales for live music events in Spain fell 63.78% in 2020. As for the artists, Mister Furia<\/a> from The Pinker Tones ended up with just 25% of his annual gigs. Clearly \u201cit wasn\u2019t the year it should have been\u201d. The Whisper Not<\/a> booking and management agency had more than 80% of their shows cancelled. Barcelona\u2019s musicians and promoters found themselves suddenly confined to their homes, their investments rapidly converting into debt. And without a legal status equivalent to the French \u2018intermittence\u2019, the extreme precariousness of the sector\u2019s entire value chain was brought dramatically to the fore.<\/p>\n