What happened to the people who built this?

For 32 years, Sónar was the project of three people: Ricard Robles, Enric Palau, and Sergio Caballero. They founded it in Barcelona in 1994, and they ran it for three decades while the festival became one of the few in the world that genuinely shaped how the industry thinks about electronic music and technology together. Then, in October 2025, all three stepped down. A fourth co-director, Ventura Barba, was also gone by year's end.

The context is not subtle. Sónar had been owned by Superstruct Entertainment, which is backed by KKR, the same private equity fund that the scene has been protesting across festival properties for years. The boycott during Sónar 2025 was public and pointed. Whether the departures were a consequence of that pressure, or of longer tensions around the ownership structure, the result is the same: the 2026 edition is the first in the festival's history with none of its creators in the room.

New CEO François Jozic is now running the operation. What he inherits is a brand with enormous global weight and a scene that is, at minimum, watching closely.

So what does the new management actually do with it?

The headline structural change for 2026 is the abolition of the day/night split. The old Sónar by Day at Montjuïc, the cultural and experimental arm of the festival that ran alongside the club programme, is discontinued. Everything now happens at Fira Gran Via in L'Hospitalet, the former Sónar by Night site, in a single continuous format running from 17:00 each day. Thursday June 18 closes at 03:00; Friday and Saturday run through to 07:00.

The counterweight to that consolidation is expansion. Sónar Week 2026 is framed as a citywide takeover: the main festival at Fira Gran Via, the Sónar+D conference at Llotja de Mar (June 18-19), OFFSónar satellite events at Poble Espanyol (June 18-21), and, for the first time in the festival's history, Sónar District at Parc del Fòrum on the Barcelona waterfront.

That last point is the one to watch. The Parc del Fòrum site is genuinely new territory for Sónar. On Friday June 19, Solid Grooves takes over with Michael Bibi, PAWSA, Mau P, Dennis Cruz, DJ Tennis, CARISTA, and PARAMIDA. On Saturday June 20, the site splits between Metamorfosi, Joseph Capriati's techno concept, with Jamie Jones and Sidney Charles, and You&Me, Josh Baker's house concept with Seth Troxler. Three distinct curators, three different flavours, all on the waterfront. That is not a small programming decision.

"The men who built this are gone. What replaces them is a much bigger machine, and the question the scene is asking is whether the machine still cares about what made the festival matter."

What does the main stage look like under new management?

At Fira Gran Via, the headliners for 2026 include Charlotte de Witte, Amelie Lens, The Prodigy, Skepta, Kelis, Modeselektor, WhoMadeWho, and Dom Dolla. Commercially solid, globally recognisable, built for scale. Nothing on that list is a surprise, and that is either reassuring or telling, depending on where you stand.

The full Sónar Week picture: 150-plus artists, 3 major events, 12 distinct satellite parties. By raw numbers, it is the largest edition in the festival's history. Size, at least, is not the problem.