As the Mallorca Live has accumulated 3.5 million public in a few years

PalmaAt Mallorca Live, in reality, the music is secondary. This sensation, which is increasingly repeated when talking about festivals, becomes a certainty in the island case if one analyzes the financial architecture that sustains the events linked to the Mallorca Live brand. Above all, a festival that in two weeks will celebrate its ninth edition, rebranded as Mallorca Live Occident. The entry of new sponsors and partners into the new promoter La Isla & Co is the latest step in a path full of countless commercial movements that are difficult to follow and, above all, to decipher: the tip of the iceberg of a network of dozens of companies that move millions of public euros to turn culture into a financial asset.

Behind Mallorca Live there isn't one company, nor two, nor three. There is a network of companies headed by the holding Soy Porque Somos, created in 2020. The parent company, therefore, began its activity four years after the first edition of the festival, which took place at Son Fusteret at the end of April 2016. In addition to this, there are about twenty companies linked to the brand, many of which share the same registered office and administrator – the festival director, Álvaro Martínez. The use of public resources by these entities has become recurrent in recent years and, far from diminishing, has increased. In the case of the Balearic Islands Tourism Strategy Agency (AETIB), for example, it has gone from an allocation of 70,247 euros in 2019 to 413,223 in 2025. Sponsorships, however, are only one of the ways in which the Mallorca Live network – which includes the Mallorca Live Nights and Es Jardí cycles – takes advantage of public resources.

More than three and a half million public

Without counting sponsorships and grants for 2026, still pending assignment, since 2021 the network has received at least 3,534,000 euros in public funds. This means that in five years it has received almost as much money as the promoter Primavera Sound in double the time, in ten years: according to the investigation by Nando Cruz published in Crític, the company behind the Barcelona festival, one of the most important in the country, received 3,992,731 euros in public funds between 2014 and 2023. In the last three years, sponsorships from AETIB for the Mallorca Live festival, which have been awarded to three different entities, amount to more than 1,400,000 euros: they have gone from 122,264 euros in 2022 to 413,223 in 2025.

The latter, that of 2025, was part of a public call for sponsorship of major cultural and sporting events. The objective was to inject funds into events with great media impact that are programmed outside of what AETIB considers high season – from July 1 to September 15 – and that, according to the call, position the destination in the "top of mind" of the target audience". The same text explains that AETIB seeks, with these sponsorships, the "diversification of the offer" and the "de-seasonality of the destination".

Among the requirements, it is specified that the sponsorship shall not exceed 30% of the budget. The same call allows for public funding of 70% of the total actual expense. L’ARA Balears has requested specific details of the agreed counterparts from the Ministry of Tourism, Culture and Sports, which has responded that “the contracting authority cannot provide the detail of these counterparts, as it would imply the disclosure of confidential data”, including “analyses and strategies provided by a private entity”. Otherwise, regarding “the absence of competition” mentioned in the process of awarding sponsorships to Mallorca Live, the Ministry points out that “only one operator can provide the service related to the festival, as it is the sole holder of the event ‘Mallorca Live Festival’ [...] Therefore, if AETIB decides to sponsor this specific event, within the framework of a public call, due to its relevance and brand positioning, it must necessarily do so with the company that holds the registration and exclusivity of the name and format. It is this exclusivity that legally justifies the absence of competition for this specific event”.

The commitment to “cultural tourism”

The sponsorship of AETIB is by no means the only one granted to Mallorca Live in recent years, and the institutional commitment to what is known as cultural tourism is linked, which has found in the Calvià festival one of its greatest emblems, as demonstrated by its presence at fairs such as ITB Berlin and FITUR in recent years. The Fundació Turisme Responsable de Mallorca allocated 260,000 euros to it in 2023 and the public-private entity Fundació Calvià 365, another 260,000 between the 2024 and 2025 editions, according to the Public Sector Contracting Platform. After all these sponsorships, the organizers' forecasts, according to a press release sent on April 30, are that the 2026 edition of the festival will exceed 15% of international audiences.

Aside from sponsorships, companies and associations within the Mallorca Live network have benefited from various subsidies since 2021 from entities such as the Consell de Mallorca or the Institut d’Estudis Baleàrics, a benchmark entity in the island's cultural sphere regarding public funding, which offers a specific subsidy for fairs and festivals. The organizers of Mallorca Live applied for this aid for different events in the 2024 and 2025 editions and, in the case of the festival, they were granted the maximum amount, 75,000 euros per event. In this call, however, the granted amount does not necessarily equate to the amount finally received: to obtain the full aid, it must be justified with reports, invoices, and payment receipts. According to the portal of the National System for the Publicity of Public Subsidies and Aid, in 2025 this festival received 58,534 euros from the IEB, while in 2024 it was 26,751, meaning that the amount received was equivalent to just over a third of the 75,000 euros initially granted. In addition to these 26,000, in 2024 the Mallorca Live network received more than 600,000 euros from various institutions.