Barcelona is in party mode. More than 300 events have turned the Catalan capital into a global celebration of music, creativity and technology thanks to a week of Sónar, a festival in constant change that every year goes outside its comfort zone and attracts more than 115,000 people. "We got rid of the music festival term some time ago, Sónar has become an event at which the attendees find business and leisure in one place," says Ventura Barba, Managing Director of Sónar.
A lawyer by training, Barba has always been involved with the world of intellectual property and technology. From lawyer to head of the Legal Department of the BMG Music label, he saw how digitisation would radically change the entertainment industry. Later, he became General Manager of Yahoo! Music in Europe and Canada, where he worked for nine years until 2009 when he decided to return to Barcelona and join the Sónar project. "This year is my tenth Sónar!" he recalls.
Barba recommends "coming, sitting down, listening and letting yourself go" in this immersive experience that has a budget of 7.9 million euros, of which 1.5 are devoted to Sónar+D; a space where creators and artists imagine the industries of the future.
25 years ago the idea behind the festival was very different than now...
Yes, 25 years ago the idea was of a festival that has nothing to do with what it is now, it was a more pseudohippy concept. Sónar is an initiative that came from three people: Sergi Cabellero, Enric Palau and Ricard Robles. And it came about because there was no urban festival, a concept that is now very common, but that then, when we began to mix different disciplines, music, technology and culture, was all very innovative.
You have organised more than 50 festivals in different places around the world. How do you go about translating the Sónar Barcelona formula?
Right now we have eight cities. It is a very long process from considering a city to carrying out the first edition. We work in a network, we are an ecosystem of events in which we feed into each other. So, when we decide to go to a city, like this year when we have included Istambul and Hong Kong, we first look at what the city can bring to the whole Sónar ecosystem. In this year’s edition of Sónar Barcelona we have a lot of artists, creators, technologists who come from Asia thanks to the relationship we have forged with Hong Kong. In short, we want Sónar’s global and transversal values to mix with the local values so that the result is a different event for each place. We are not a franchise, we do not export a product, we are an international product. We do not obsess about being bigger, we want to be relevant to our public.
"We are not a franchise, we do not export a product, we are an international product"
What are Sónar’s characteristics?
Without a doubt one of the defining features of Sónar is its link with technology and how the artists and creators use this discipline in developing their work. Another characteristic would be that, as we are an event about creativity, music and technology, we also apply theory. We like to be at the forefront of the latest trends; for the last couple of years the festival has been chasless and this year we are also applying geo-localisation. We are an event in which technology is everywhere, in fact, I see us as a digital company, even though the experience is totally physical, if we think about the operation of the festival, the before, during and after, it turns us into e-commerce. In that sense, Sónar is at the forefront of applying innovation to traditional, physical industries.
Photo: Àngel Bravo
Why should an executive of a financial organisation come to Sónar?
The combination of Sónar and Sónar+D generates a unique disruptive environment that is not only for people working in the cultural and creative industries, but also for those in more distant sectors, such as banking or pharma, who should come to smell the innovation and to find new opportunities. Any executive, business person, entrepreneur with anything of a nose should come by Sónar+D, it is a great shop window for new business models, products and services. For all the R&D departments in large companies, innovation is now more easily found in a lab or research centre than in the large research departments of these companies.
"For all the R&D departments in large companies, innovation is now more easily found in a lab"
So, you connect the creative and technological worlds with the business world?
Yes, the three basic pillars of Sónar+D are creativity, technology and business; the fifth edition offers more than 200 activities and includes more than 180 speakers talking about the new narratives of virtual reality and artificial intelligence. Introducing artists or creators to dynamics that used to be the terrain of mathematicians, engineers and economists implies a disruptive process. It is the theory of STEAM: Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, Mathematics. The creator is not a passive subject of technology. What would happens if we were to bring together the technology of virtual reality with our creators and professionals in the Vall d'Hebron Hospital? Perhaps it would produce a project that improves society’s standard of health.
Talking to people who are not in your sector or environment... What is the response of large companies?
At the beginning they had the feeling that this event was not for them, later on we went through the stage of "I’ll come and see but as if I were a zoologist" and now they believe that there is something here that they don’t completely understand but they know they have to be part of. In this sense, the Startup Garden is the way in. We also have the example of the Sorigué Foundation, which has been working with us for years in the SonarPLANTA, a space that this year has an interactive installation by the Japanese artist Daito Manabe that links technology and innovation with the plant they have in Balaguer. In other words, large companies are not alien to innovation and they understand that Sónar+D is a good laboratory for experimenting.