Hey my indie friend,

I’ll keep it short: welcome to Mitxoda Weekly, your indie home. Every Friday, a breath of fresh musical air.

This week? Absolute chaos. Impossible to sum up. My dishwasher is dead, my back isn’t doing much better. I can’t finish a song, I can’t even reply to emails right now. And yet, hell yes, I’ve got plenty of good news.

You can still vote for your own track (or the one you love most) in the Top100. You can still dive into the latest track I’ve been listening to, just below. And yes, I still sometimes get lost in strange, fascinating maps discovered on Subvert.

Oh, and it was Belgian Music Week, so you know how that goes.

Quick heads-up for MostlyBlue: starting next week, I’ll be sharing the tips and tricks he regularly offers his followers. Definitely worth the read.

Because sometimes, a good analysis is healthy, and necessary 😃
Let’s go.

Love 🤍, and happy reading,
Mitxoda

Something landed this week that deserves your full attention.

A research team led by Matthieu Barreira, backed by Reset! network and Live DMA, just published two maps that lay bare a truth most of us feel but rarely see in black and white: the European live music scene, your festivals, your arenas, your ticketing platforms, is controlled by a remarkably small number of hands.

Four corporate groups. Over 150 major European festivals. One uncomfortable question.

Let that sink in for a moment.

The maps trace ownership lines from the stages you stand in front of, all the way up to boardrooms, billionaires, and private equity funds. Here's the landscape:

Live Nation — the American behemoth. Around 120 subsidiaries across Europe. $16.7 billion in turnover. They own or operate 270+ venues, 145+ festivals, the entire O2 Academy chain in the UK, and oh! Ticketmaster. The integration is vertical and total: they book the artist, promote the show, own the venue, sell the ticket, and take a cut at every single step.

CTS Eventim — Europe's quiet giant, run by Klaus-Peter Schulenberg who holds a 38.8% stake. €1.9 billion in sales across 20+ countries. They control a sprawling empire of ticketing platforms — See Tickets, Eventim, France Billet (65%), FanSale — plus major arenas from Milan to Cologne.

AEG / The Anschutz Corporation — Philip Anschutz's empire. The O2 Arena in London, Mercedes-Benz Arena in Berlin, plus a growing festival portfolio that doubled from 5 to 10 between 2022 and 2025. They combine concert promotion with venue ownership in a way that makes competition almost theoretical.

Superstruct Entertainment — this one's the canary in the coal mine. Bought by private equity firm KKR (with CVC as co-investor) in 2024, Superstruct operates 80+ festivals across ten countries. Their mapped festival count nearly doubled from 34 to 63 in three years. When private equity enters the room, the conversation is no longer about music. It's about returns.

And on the French side of the map, there's a whole other web: Vivendi (hello, Bolloré), Fimalac (the Lacharrière family controlling 150+ artists and Les Ardentes), GL Events running the Zénith network, the Bouygues family linked to arenas in Belgium. The second map, focused on venues and stages, reveals just how deep the rabbit hole goes.

The festival map is organized around four central nodes, four individuals, really, from whom everything radiates outward. John C. Malone (Liberty Media, 30.13% of Live Nation), Philip Anschutz (AEG), Klaus-Peter Schulenberg (CTS Eventim), and the KKR founders Georges Roberts and Henry Kravis. Every festival logo branches from these names like a corporate family tree.

The venues map adds layers: ticketing platforms, production companies, management agencies, real estate holdings. You start to see the machine. A handful of corporations don't just promote concerts, they own the buildings, control the tickets, manage the artists, and increasingly, they own the festivals where those artists play.

Between 2022 and 2025, consolidation accelerated across the board. More festivals absorbed. More acquisitions closed. More private equity money flowing in.

And here's the kicker: most small and medium-sized venues remain independent, associative, municipal, or locally owned. The grassroots ecosystem still breathes. But it breathes in a world where the oxygen is being quietly consumed from above.

This is the part I care about most. And it's the part these maps don't show, because it's happening below the radar, in the cracks of the system.

The inflation problem. When Live Nation bids up headliner fees to astronomical levels, it creates a cascade. Mid-level artists cost more. Booking budgets for small venues get squeezed. The indie band that should be playing your local 300-cap room? They either can't afford to tour or they can't get booked because the margins don't work anymore.

The exclusivity trap. Artists signed to major booking agencies affiliated with these groups can face radius clauses, no playing a competing venue within X kilometers or Y days of a corporate show. Your freedom to play where you want, when you want? It's negotiable. And the negotiating power isn't on your side.

The data asymmetry. Ticketmaster, Eventim, See Tickets… they don't just sell tickets. They collect data. They know who buys what, when, and where. That intelligence feeds back into programming decisions, dynamic pricing, and artist valuation. Independent artists and venues? They're flying blind by comparison.

The attention economy. Every euro a fan spends on a mega-festival ticket is a euro not spent at your local club on a Tuesday night. Every hour scrolling Live Nation's Instagram algorithm is an hour not discovering something genuinely new. The concentration isn't just financial, it's cultural.

The illusion of choice. This might be the most insidious part. You think you're choosing between different festivals, different experiences, different vibes. But when four groups own 150+ festivals, your "choice" is increasingly between different flavors of the same product, with the same ticketing backend, the same booking networks, and the same financial logic driving every lineup decision.

The researchers put it simply, and I think it's worth repeating:

MEP Emma Rafowicz has already called for limits on vertical integration and ownership of multiple events within the same market. This is now a policy conversation, not just an industry gripe.

But here's my take, and this is where Mitxoda lives and breathes:

The maps show the top of the pyramid. They don't show what's underneath.

Underneath, there are thousands of small venues, DIY collectives, independent promoters, community radio shows, and artists who make music because they have to, not because a P&L spreadsheet told them to. That ecosystem is alive. It's fragile, it's underfunded, it's invisible to most policy discussions, but it's alive.

As someone on the Subvert forum put it perfectly this week: "There's that whole big business music landscape and below, there's a whole different venues ecosystem, more or less DIY, and quite low key."

The question isn't whether these two worlds coexist. They do. The question is: for how long, and on whose terms?

I'm not going to pretend there's a five-step action plan that fixes structural market concentration. But there are choices. Small ones that compound.

Buy direct. If an artist sells tickets through their own site or a local platform, use that. Every transaction outside the Ticketmaster/Eventim ecosystem is a vote.

Show up local. That 200-cap venue in your neighborhood running shows on a shoestring? That's the frontline. Your presence, your ticket, your beer, your word-of-mouth, is what keeps it alive.

Follow the money. Before you buy a festival pass, take 30 seconds to check who's behind it. The maps are public. The information is there now. Use it.

Support indie media. The artists in the Mitxoda Indie Top 100, the ones who submit tracks to Le Salon Indie, the ones who write to us every week, they exist outside this corporate map entirely. Sharing their music, subscribing to independent newsletters, tuning into community radio, that's not a symbolic gesture. That's infrastructure.

Talk about it. Share the maps. Ask the questions out loud. The greatest weapon of consolidation is invisibility. These maps just turned the lights on.

The full research is available at Reset! network. The festival and venue ownership maps are downloadable. Study them. They're the most important thing published about European live music this year.

Resident Advisor also covered this with a solid article worth reading.

This week’s Top 10 isn’t about winning prizes, it’s about love, support, and staying in it together.

Listen Back to the last Friday Salon Indie de Mitxoda here.

I’ll see you all later today at 4:00 PM (Brussels time) for the 41st episode of Le Salon Indie de Mitxoda, live at salon.mitxoda.be, see you very soon.

In a world of maps, power lines, silence, noise, and broken dishwashers, one thing quietly remains.

Music still finds cracks.

Indie still breathes below the surface.

People still show up, to listen, to question, to care.

If this edition felt heavy, that’s because it matters.

If it felt alive, that’s because you are part of it.

Take care of the small rooms.

Take care of the fragile sounds.

Take care of yourself, too.

See you next week,

Love,
🖤 Mitxoda

END 😆