BIS Festival

The Barcelona Independent Sessions (BIS) Festival celebrates the independent music that’s emerged in the wake of the economic crisis Europe suffered from 2008-2014, a global trend which took its toll on the music industry, among other sectors, prompting a sudden drop-off in opportunities for new and emerging talents. From the complex context of this troubling environment, the event organizers opted to hold a festival that would give a new and needed voice to the unstoppable creativity of the indie scene that’s always at play in Barcelona, providing a public platform for those who were unable to break out on the scene on their own, due to limiting economic circumstances.

With this noble and important agenda, BIS began in 2013, opening as a music festival that featured independent music and independent management, innovatively uniting a vibrant and diverse collective of recording artists, managers, agents, and musicians in the city who were struggling for much the same reasons to make meaningful professional growth. The goal was - and remains to this day - to join forces and dynamize the music industry by promoting concert attendance, boosting sales, and encouraging music production and sound recording in general.

The 2018 celebration will be held in the Fabra i Coats Creative Factory, a converted warehouse and factory space that’s now been retrofitted as an interdisciplinary space to promote artistic collaboration, and to support new content development in all mediums, including studio arts, sound recording, and multimedia installations.