<![CDATA[Ara Balears in English - money]]> 10 <![CDATA[How Mallorca Live has accumulated 3.5 million audiences in a few years]]>

At Mallorca Live, in reality, the music is secondary. This feeling, which is increasingly repeated when talking about festivals, becomes a certainty in the island's case if one analyzes the financial architecture that sustains the events linked to the Mallorca Live brand. At the forefront of 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 filled with countless commercial movements that are difficult to follow and, above all, to decipher: the tip of the iceberg of an network of dozens of companies that move millions of public euros to turn culture into a financial asset.

]]> <![CDATA[Dining rooms]]> It would not be wrong to say that, in principle, the initiative is worthy of praise… That a web portal wants to inform us about how public money is spent is just another step towards democratic transparency, the one that pushes us not to hide anything about matters that concern us all. We pay taxes so that these satisfy collective needs, but in what way money goes to certain things and not to others is debatable, that is, pure politics. A gentleman may consider that museums are full of irrelevancies, and that money should all go to healthcare and education, and not to things as ethereal as art, be it in a museum or a theatre. It is debatable, but collectively we have decided that public money should also go to things like these: paying musicians at local festivals, the 'capgrossos' (big heads), the 'colles castelleres' (human tower groups), popular culture, and not just the aid received by industry or subsidies to agriculture. Not to mention military spending. Judging who should receive public money, and who should not, is not so simple. Designing a fair tax system is the work of specialists —it is extremely complicated—, not a bar or social media debate. The citizen without much political training or knowledge may feel compelled to be outraged just because they see that they pay taxes, or don't make ends meet, and then a man receives half a million euros for making a film that, moreover, is bad or hardly anyone ends up watching it. Or that the minister in charge goes to see the Oscars live and in person in Los Angeles at the public expense. To the website that seeks to scrutinize all this in the Catalan sphere, they have christened it 'menjòmetre', meaning that there are 'feeders' to which too many people are clinging. The disposition with which these things are to be evaluated is already a form of politics, of course; and above all, it must be known that the objective is not so much to rethink where the money goes as to mock and put—famous—heads on the block. As if discovering that a writer, for example, takes thousands of euros in contracts with the media, or at reading clubs, or in grants for creation, would somehow discredit them. Public media also cost us a whole lot of money, but it's good that they exist (but if you want to rethink their size or expenditure, they already consider you 'right-wing'). Without them, the search for objectivity would be even more complicated, but they also shouldn't be afraid to be transparent with themselves. Very often these figures are published for demagogic purposes, to make the electorate feel that we are governed by manipulators, cronies, and engineers of trickery, but it is not explained that behind these contracts and subsidies there are also families, salaries, jobs, and money that do not disappear into a void, but rather are later transformed into consumption in the economy of all. It seems that money that does not go directly into our pockets is always wasted.   

]]>