Free music and free air

Music and fresh air. Something you don’t see very often.

My friend and I were heading across Madrid to meet up with some friends when we stumbled onto an open concert. Bright blue lasers cut through the dark, a full band tore into a song on a full production stage and the buzzing crowd pulled us in. Flashlights were held up and the screen behind the artist was playing calm, ethereal montages. His piano skills paired with his strong voice carried an echo of heartbreak and bittersweet hope. He was a young man singing in Spanish, and though I couldn’t understand the words, I felt every one of them. He communicated beyond words.

The square swayed as one — teenagers, grandparents and families all folded into the same sound. Groups of young adults sang the lyrics in unison. Grandparents who had likely just stumbled onto the scene moved gently to the rhythm. Little kids sat perched high on their parents’ shoulders, taking it all in. Some sang every word, some simply soaked in the atmosphere and it didn’t matter which.

Everyone was part of the music. Music doesn’t just play, it connects. It is more than sound coming out of a speaker. It is emotion and feeling passing from one person to another. The energy caught and spread, binding strangers into one shared experience instead of a room full of individual listeners.
Beyond the beautiful mix of ages all connected in one wondrous moment, what struck me was the space between people. In America, concerts of any genre, whether house, country, reggae, indie or rap, are all insanely crowded. Reaching the front is nearly impossible, and even if you never make it to the barrier, breathing is not an option.

We were both shocked by how much fresh air we had to ourselves. Our first guess was that the artist simply wasn’t that famous. So, of course, we looked him up. His name is Iñigo Quintero, a popular Spanish singer and songwriter with over 4.7 million monthly listeners on Spotify. In 2023, he reached number one on the Spotify Global chart, the first solo Spanish artist to do so, and in 2024, he earned a nomination for Best New Artist at the 25th Annual Latin Grammys. Clearly, this was no unknown act, which left the question lingering: Why was there so much space?

Maybe the show being free and held in a public square gave people more freedom to move. However, every free concert I’ve been to back home has been packed, with people elbowing for the best view. Free concerts at this level are rare in America, and the few that happen are jammed with people. Even rare pop-ups like Daniel Caesar, who posts the locations of his free concerts just before the beginning of his performance, still somehow seems to fill to the max.

So why was there so much space here? Maybe it’s because free concerts in Madrid aren’t rare. When I looked it up, I found that Spanish cities host countless free public concerts, especially around festivals and holidays, funded by the local government for anyone who wants to show up. If another one is always around the corner, nobody treats it like their one shot, so nobody fights like it’s life or death. It is somewhere you can simply relax and take the music in, with none of the pre-show anxiety.

At most American concerts, there’s the anxiety over pre-sale tickets, checking prices and planning months in advance. Once you’re finally at the show, there’s the urge to record everything, to get the perfect shot for your Instagram story. But maybe that urge is what gets in the way. The reason you came begins to blur. Are you there to watch them perform, to sing along with your friends and soak up the whole experience? Or are you there to capture it all on camera, to look back later at footage of a night you barely felt? In the end, it’s just a video you could have watched on someone else’s phone.

I’m not saying I haven’t done the same. Sometimes when I rewatch my concert videos, I can’t remember how the moment felt because I was so busy filming it so I could keep it forever. But at this random, public concert, listening to an artist I have never heard of before, I had no urge to search for my phone to record. I was listening, feeling and experiencing along with the crowd. I remember how I felt that night because I was in the present.

Part of that was the way he offered it. The stage, the lasers, the band: it was all there, but none of it felt like a performance staged for profit. It felt generous, like he wanted to share his music and create an experience for others. I left Sol that night wondering why that kind of concert feels so rare back home. We pay, we plan, we push and somewhere in all of it, we lose the point.

However, the real luxury wasn’t that it was free, it was that nothing stood between us and the music, no price, no screen — just space to feel.

Siobhan believes concerts should be experienced, not just attended.