“The volume is insane”: Questions to Chris Ortiz, President of Riff Music

Riff Music is one of the few independent promoters still doing big business in Spain. The team around co-founders Chris Ortiz and Carlos Espinosa is headquartered in Cordoba, Andalusia. It employs 18 full-time staff in the office and 12 external staff, most of whom work directly with the artists that Riff not only promotes but in some cases also manages. This close involvement in the live careers of the artists, coupled with extensive experience in the Spanish and Latin American market, allows this independent company to succeed in a world of live entertainment dominated by large conglomerates.

As it turns out, the hardest part of the job is keeping up with the sheer volume of live entertainment on offer at any given time. If people are on a tight budget in these uncertain times, they certainly aren’t going to neglect live events. At least that’s the impression Chris Ortiz gets when he sells anything these days. It’s created problems in the live supply chain, and it’s difficult to find qualified staff to handle the volume of events taking place unless you’re an established business with long-standing relationships.

When we last spoke in November, you suggested that there might be a decline or at least a slowdown in overall sales due to the weak economy, a certain saturation of shows, etc. It sounds like that still hasn’t happened.
There’s definitely a certain saturation. There are a lot of shows that don’t sell well and a lot of festivals that are over the top, but that’s always been the case. Most of the new tours that we put on sale, they all sell very well. If you have a show that’s hard to defend, you have to get out early because people’s schedules are completely full. We had a show in Seville last night with Melendi, an 18,000-person arena, his biggest show ever in Seville, and probably double the sales of the last time he was there. The night before, there were 50,000 people in the stadium seeing ESTOPA, another Spanish band that has a very similar fan base to Melendi. Five years ago, those two shows on the same weekend would have meant both of them would have suffered. Now here we are and both are sold out, both acts are doing record numbers. One on a Saturday night, one on a Sunday night, on the same weekend in a city that isn’t Madrid or Barcelona.

We all expected sales to fall because of inflation, because interest rates are going up and people are paying more on their mortgages and paying more at the supermarket. But they’re still spending record amounts on live music.

That’s an indication of how much live entertainment means to people, isn’t it?
Yes. In our industry, we have always said that music is recession-proof and people would always find a way to go to concerts. Look at the example of Argentina or Chile, countries that have been in a difficult economic situation for decades. And yet in Argentina, all records seem to have been broken when it comes to live music: Roger Waters and Coldplay built 10 stadiums in 2022, Luis Miguel 10 Movistar arenas in 2023. Here we have a country with all these problems, and yet live music can thrive.

The same goes for restaurants and leisure in general. You can’t get a table in any of the top restaurants in Spain, everything is always full. People have made a choice. I don’t know if that means giving up savings or spending money in other areas, but concerts, restaurants, bars, nightclubs, festivals – business is just very good everywhere.

As one of the few independently operating promoters in the country, how do you deal with the huge volume? Can you talk a bit about how you, as an indie promoter, find your way in this booming live economy?
It definitely seems to be getting harder. A lot of our ticket sales come from national acts, which we also manage, book exclusively and promote in most parts of Spain and sometimes even outside of Spain. With these acts, it’s a very personal service: you’re involved in designing the shows, choosing band members, helping with a number of things, and also going on tour with them. My partner and I attend at least 80% of our artists’ shows. It’s a service that a big company can’t offer, at least not as efficiently as we can, because you have to have time for the artist.

Melendi, for example, is doing record deals, and by record I mean he’s probably recording three times as much as he ever did before. With Malú, we’re doing great business now after her 2022 tour wasn’t so successful. And Manuel Carrasco has just gone through the roof. There’s definitely a combination of reasons, I’m not saying it’s solely down to our management. Both Malú and Melendi have released anniversary albums this year, and that’s definitely brought the older fans back. But I don’t see any international company, any big group, that would be able to help these types of artists at all levels like we’re helping them right now.

The volume is insane, but we’re lucky to have very good teams. Each artist has their own personal team. On top of that, we work with independent promoters all over the world, relationships that we’ve built over 15, 20 years, in some cases even longer. We’re comfortable in this little niche that we’ve created for ourselves. We work with other promoters on a lot of tours, so we often don’t have to send a full team. In every market, we have very good, loyal, local partners. Ultimately, this will always be a relationship business, you need people on the ground that you can trust, and they have to trust you. That includes relationships with our suppliers, the one part of the business that really worries me right now. The volume they’re facing has become insane. We have suppliers for stages, security, and sound doing 25, 30 shows in a weekend. There’s definitely a shortage. You have to plan your tours very far in advance to make sure you have your suppliers on board. We started selling very late and were able to find suppliers, but that’s because we’re loyal to each other. I don’t think it would have been the same if we had been a smaller company. It’s become very difficult to find people.

Are there any upcoming highlights you would like to point out?
Manuel Carrasco will play at the Bernabeu, Real Madrid’s stadium, at the end of this month, on June 29. In July, Blues Cazorla will celebrate its 30th anniversary. And Melendi’s tour will probably be one of the biggest ticket sales of any Spanish artist this year. Everywhere we go, the concerts are sold out, in Valladolid, Seville, Zaragoza, Valencia, wherever.

Have local artists and regional repertoire become more important to your business than international ones in recent years?
Internationally, it’s getting more and more difficult. A lot of acts you used to work with are now working directly with festivals, which is understandable because everyone does that. We didn’t really plan on having a local repertoire. But because of our experience with a lot of exclusive national tours for national and international acts, working in every single province in the country, as well as our experience in Latin America, we’ve become stronger in that area. There’s a tendency for artists to turn to us. So the domestic market is definitely a stronger part of our business at the moment than it was five years ago.

Are there any towns or markets in Spain that were not traditionally part of the tour route but have emerged in recent years?
Generally, I think every city has increased exponentially. Just yesterday I was talking to a promoter friend of mine from Granada, a city of about 400,000 people. We were talking about how last year we had Joaquin Sabina in the bullring, two nights, Friday and Sunday, sold out. During that time there were concerts in an outdoor auditorium of the Alhambra Palace, there was a show in the sports hall with 8,000 people, there was a festival just outside the city with about 20,000 people. All of those shows would have made up the annual number of live events in Granada 10 years ago. And now we have 10 or 12 shows in one weekend. We remembered that because last weekend there was a similar number of events, including a local artist playing two stadiums while an older local artist played in the bullring.

We used to worry that we wouldn’t attract as many young people to our shows, but the audience is getting younger and younger. On average, they’re going to a lot more shows than they did a few years ago. The people who used to go to maybe two or three shows a year are now going to eight or ten, and that’s catching on.

Are you observing any other trends?
We’re seeing a huge revival of bands that once struck a chord at a positive time in people’s lives. There are a few bands in Spain that had a few hits years ago, songs that you always hear at weddings or parties and that have become part of people’s memories. Over the years, these bands would play to 2,000 people in a city like Madrid. Now they’re touring and filling 13,000, 14,000 sold-out venues on weekends in several cities. It’s just crazy, but something you see internationally too. Important pieces from your youth, bands that hadn’t been together for 15, 20, 25 years. That happened to us last year with Fondo Flamenco, a band that had broken up 10 years earlier. They didn’t want to get back together, but we started talking to them about doing a few shows. For our first show in Seville, we played it safe and went to a venue with 3,500 people. We sold out, did another show, sold out, did another, sold out. We ended up doing four shows and could have done more, but we just didn’t have enough capacity. They ended up playing in Madrid, two days at the WiZink Center, 14,000 each night. Before they split up, they never came anywhere close to those numbers.

I can think of five albums that I would definitely like to see live.
But if you saw one of their shows announced 10 years ago, you would have thought, “Wow, those guys are still playing?” It wouldn’t have been a fun night, but something has changed. Now groups of friends go out to relive those memories. A band called Camela played in Cordoba last weekend. They were the first to start selling their cassettes at gas stations in Spain. They’ve always had a following among truck and taxi drivers, all these guys are really into them. Over the years, it became a cult. Now they sell five, six times more than they ever did in their career. There are a number of bands like that.

In general, the quality of shows and festivals has really increased. People leave these shows very satisfied. These experiences have become something that parents want to do with their children. It’s a dream scenario: going to a show with the whole family. It’s one of the best experiences you can have.

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