<p>The approach to festivalization concerns a tendency in present-day, western societies to arrange cultural production in a festival-like way. This marks a shift that some scholars argue is a societal phenomenon intertwined with changing consumer habits, social practices, emergent markets, creative city promotion policies and developing government policies. The focus on festivalization as an analytic tool for describing a process of adapting music and musical behaviours to the festival format is already well established in academia. Recently researchers and stakeholders started to witness with serious concern the concentration process in the European live music sector leaded by major groups own stakes in several key steps of the music value chain, such as artist management, ticketing and live distribution (venues and festivals), hampering the competitiveness of small and independent festivals. The innovation of our present contribution lies in our proposal to approach the processes of festivalization as undergone by small and medium-sized cities in Spain, which are both complex and diverse in terms of territorial reality. At the same time, we intend to identify processes of financialization that lead to extractivist models for the music festival, far from those that favour situated cultural and/or productive engagement, as well as from the emergence of festivals that have proven to be fertile for the territories that host them. After an extensive literature review, we have approached the research on the basis of a time-frame from the creation of the first musical festival (1939) that remained active until 2019. We conducted an exhaustive scrutiny of secondary statistical sources as well as specialised yearbooks and websites of the sample of cities and festivals. A database has been built with all this information, which brings together 402 festivals by urban location, date of establishment, number of editions held, musical style, organizing institution, etc. With all this information, an analysis has been carried out using descriptive statistics, tables and cartography. While the initial time-frame was designed to analyze the growth and spread of the different music festivals and their characteristics connected with the process of festivalization, a second and more limited time-frame of 2000–2023 has focused on analysis of the processes of financialization observed in the field. For this purpose, we have carried out exhaustive monitoring of the merger-and-acquisition processes involving foreign investment funds and large multinationals through the sector’s yearbooks and the specialized media. The data and evidence gathered in this contribution show that many small and medium-sized cities consider music festivals to be a valuable asset to culture-led urban policies, both in the pursuit of urban regeneration/local development goals and in their repositioning and diversification as tourist destinations. We have witnessed the unprecedented evolution in the number of festivals over the past three decades; the spread of festivals throughout the urban network, especially in its Mediterranean coast and in metropolitan area settings. The interrelationship between territory and institutionality leads to the identification of two extreme festival types: situated cultural initiatives and practices (festivals with roots and anchorage in a specific locality) and spatially unbounded festivals (without any commitment to the territory and showing extractive behaviour). The former type is mostly dominated by classical, flamenco, jazz/blues, and traditional/world music festivals, while the latter consists almost exclusively of pop/rock and urban multi-style festivals. The high profitability of many of these festivals explains why foreign investment funds have turned their eyes in this direction in recent years.</p>