Music as a museum piece, not a rave

Ricard Robles, Enric Palau, and Sergi Caballero founded Sonar in 1994, staging the first edition at CCCB, a contemporary culture museum, with a club-scale night program at Sala Apolo. Co-founder Enric Palau has described the original idea plainly: electronic music was already popular in Barcelona, but Sonar's difference was programming it in the context of a museum rather than a nightclub. About 6,000 people came to that first edition; by 1996 attendance had already tripled.

Two festivals under one name

Sonar by Day ran at CCCB and the neighboring MACBA museum for nineteen years before moving to the larger Fira Montjuic grounds in 2013, the same year the festival launched Sonar+D, a standalone congress on creativity and technology that now runs inside the daytime program. Sonar by Night settled at the much larger Fira Gran Via venue in 2001, where it still runs. The split lets Sonar do two different things at once: an intimate, experimental daytime festival and a full-scale club night, under the same name. The format has since been licensed to editions in cities including Hong Kong, Istanbul, Reykjavik, and Bogota.

The founders' exit

In 2018, Superstruct Entertainment bought a majority stake in Sonar; Superstruct itself was acquired by the investment firm KKR in 2024. In 2025, more than 50 artists withdrew from that year's festival over KKR's ties to Israeli companies, and in October 2025 all three founders, along with longtime CEO Ventura Barba, formally stepped away from the festival after more than three decades. Superstruct described it as a planned generational handover, though the timing landed in the middle of the controversy regardless. Francois Jozic, founder of Barcelona's Brunch Electronik festival, took over as CEO.