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Barcelona’s Sónar festival begins this week with an intent to defend its position as one of the world’s best electronic music festivals, with a flurry of structural changes and a quiet mission to shake off the lingering controversy of the 2025 event.
Drawing attendees from Spain, Europe and well beyond, with a heavy contingent of fans coming from the United States, Sónar 2026 starts Thursday (June 18) and continues through Saturday (June 20) with a lineup more than 100 global artists. The bill includes legends like The Prodigy and Skepta, along with rising stars, underground favorites and more commercially known names, with Amelie Lens, Boys Noize, Charlotte de Witte, Sara Landry, Chris Stussy, Kelis, SBTRKT and Sammy Virji all on the bill.
A tastemaker since its 1994 launch, a remit to evolve is baked into Sónar’s stated mission of celebrating the intersection of electronic music, technology and creativity — an assignment both symbolized and taken seriously by the event’s new CEO, François Jozic.
“Sónar is not something frozen in the past,” says Jozic, speaking to Billboard in May from his office in Barcelona. “It must evolve, and it must anticipate new trends. That’s part of the DNA, and I’m trying to combine both. Let’s see what the fan says in June.”
Any previous Sónar attendee will immediately notice this year’s most significant change, the location. Traditionally held at two Barcelona venues — with Fira Montjuïc hosting the more relaxed music and activity-focused Sónar By Day and Fira Gran Via housing Sónar By Night, a more festival-like affair that starts at 10 p.m. and goes until after sunrise — current construction at Fira Montjuïc means the entirety of Sónar will for the first time happen solely at Fira Gran Via. Daytime shows will be held outside on redesigned stages, with three indoor stages (including one that can accommodate upwards of 25,000 people) hosting Sónar By Night. Altogether, this means the first year of continuous programming in Sónar’s history.
Sónar 2026 is the first edition helmed by Jozic, who stepped into the CEO role last October after Sónar’s original founders, Enric Palau, Sergi Caballero and Ricard Robles, announced their departure earlier that month. They left roughly five months after a major backlash to and boycott of Sónar 2025, due to the festival’s ownership by festival conglomerate Superstruct Entertainment and that company’s owner, the investment firm KKR.
Founded in London in 2017 by James Barton, the former president of electronic music of Live Nation, Superstruct has a controlling stake in more than 80 festivals across Europe and Australia including Hungary’s Sziget, the Netherlands’ Awakenings and DGTL, and London’s Field Day. Superstruct acquired Sónar in 2018.
Initially owned by private equity firm Providence Equity Partners, Superstruct was sold to KKR in June 2024, which eventually spurred the boycott against Sónar due to KKR’s alleged business interests in Israel. (Other Superstruct brands, most significantly Field Day in London, were also boycotted.) In May 2025, more than 70 artists signed an open letter to Sónar demanding the festival “distance itself from KKR’s complicit investments, adopt ethical programming and partnership policies, respect [boycott, divest, sanction] guidelines and engage with artists on all the above.” Upwards of 30 artists dropped out of the 2025 event, which happened last June.
With Sónar’s three founders leaving the festival months after the boycott, some hypothesized that they’d left because of it — a narrative Jozic refutes. “There were a lot of conversations about the fact that they left suddenly, out of nowhere, but no, it was planned in advance.”
He says that upon selling Sónar to Superstruct in 2018, the founders “had to commit [to staying with the festival] for five years, to make sure the right transition team was properly trained and formed for the future. It’s very typical that a platform like Superstruct asks you to commit for five years.” While the terms of this deal would have allowed the founders to leave in 2023, Jozic says their five-year commitment was extended until 2025 due to the pandemic. (Sónar did not happen in 2020 or 2021.)
Originally from Belgium, Jozic started throwing events in Ibiza, later becoming active in the Barcelona and wider Spanish electronic music industry. After a period spent living in Montreal, he helped bring the Canadian electronic event Piknic Électronik to Barcelona, where it became the festival and party series Brunch Electronik. He later hosted editions in Madrid, Lisbon, Ibiza, Los Angeles and beyond. (Sónar has also held international editions in Tokyo and Istanbul.)
Knowing the Sónar team well through this work, Jozic says taking the CEO role “was quite a natural transition.” Still, some wondered if his arrival would shift the tone and programming of the hallowed Sónar. “Coming from Brunch, the question was there about me, my leadership and if I would transform Sónar into Brunch, which was an easy one for me to answer,” says Jozic. “It would be ridiculous to give up such a strong brand [with Sónar] to turn it into something that already exists. That didn’t make sense.”
But baked into the role of leading Sónar is the aforementioned mandate to evolve it. “The festival is 33 years old, and has been a fantastic success, so on the one hand you want to respect that legacy and not change anything,” says Jozic. “On the other hand, the DNA of Sónar is about creativity, innovation, technology, so you must change.” This heavy focus on emerging technology comes particularly through the programming of Sonar +D, an interactive exhibition space that happens in tandem with the festival and presents projects, prototypes and products focused on digital creativity, art and tech from global creators. Jozic points out that through Sonar +D, the event has stayed well ahead of the curve, having presented conversations about AI for the last decade and about digital art for more than 15 years.
“When you think about it, there are not so many actors who’ve gathered so much about digital culture in one place in the world, in one moment,” Jozic says.
Jozic’s goal is to continue “fully integrating digital art into the festival,” a vision that this year encompasses its first interactive installation, called Organismo, a roughly 10,800-square foot-installation that moves and changes depending on the time of day and how the crowd is interacting.
In this spirit of innovation, 2026 also introduces several redesigned stages and a new venue called Sónar District, which will feature strains of electronic music like the commercial juggernaut tech house, which hasn’t typically been presented at the fest. Also new is Sónar Kids, a day of programming with activities for children and parents. While Jozic says this addition is partially for parents who might not be able to go out at night, “I’m also preparing the new generations for the next 10 to 15 years. We want the smallest ones to come and enjoy activities around electronic music and digital culture.”
This eye toward the future has also, naturally, involved Jozic having conversations about last year’s boycott, private equity, artistic freedom and the ethics of participation. He says, “I completely understand the first reaction people had in May, [which was:] ‘We disagree with the presence of an investor that seemed to be implicated in Israel. We disagree with that as a fan or artist, and [wish to] boycott it.”
His take, however, is that with such actions, “You’re not boycotting an investor or a fund, nor are you resolving a genocide in Gaza. You’re boycotting a local festival [whose] mission is to promote culture and support artists. Over time, both audiences and artists came to understand that, if there is a fight to be had, it should be [directed] elsewhere — but surely not at a music festival?”
Of course, many of the artists who signed the open letter and dropped off the 2025 lineup argued that cultural institutions are the right pressure point and that disengaging from festivals with ties to harmful investments is itself a meaningful act. While no artists dropped out of Sónar this year (it’s not clear if any simply chose not to participate at all), Jozic says many of the conversations he had with artists and their teams were about how Sónar might be influenced by the private equity behind it.
“The questions were also, ‘Are you influenced? Are your decisions based on criteria given by an investor?’” He emphasizes that Sónar is now, as it has always been, “a safe space for the artist, and being a safe space is that you can express yourself as you wish. We promote that, and we encourage it.” To wit, last year several artists showed images of the Palestinian flag during their performances, in shows of solidarity.
Conversations also focused on the intersection of capital and culture, with acts “wanting to be sure there would still be a place for non-super commercial acts, and to be sure that Sónar is still a platform to discover new talent, new trends, new styles.”
The Sónar website now includes an extensive “Sónar Responds” FAQ section explaining its position on issues related to the boycott. (Q: “Do you condemn the genocide of the Palestinian people?” A: “Yes, absolutely. Our position is clear and unequivocal: we condemn the genocide of the Palestinian people.”) While Jozic concedes that “Probably part of the Sónar audience will not come” following the boycott, he says that the event is also reaching a newer, younger audience. “Tickets are selling,” he says, “and selling well.”
Even as Sónar 2026 is just getting underway, Jozic is looking to the future. He notes that while nothing else that was happening when Sónar began in ‘94 really compared to the festival’s intersection of electronic music and technology, that mixture has now become the industry standard. Still, the festival is committed to continuing to showcase the bleeding edge of both.
Thirty-three years in, the festival that built its reputation on being ahead of the curve is now also working to stay ahead of a different question — not about what’s next in electronic music, but about who will determine its future.
For Jozic, the answer is straightforward. “It’s clear the reason Sónar has been successful is because it created a strong link with the artists and community, and I want to preserve this. It’s a festival the people of Barcelona are so proud of — it belongs to the city.”
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