When they began to make their way they were called the Vikings of live music. “Nobody knew us, we didn’t know what the business was like, but we had achieved the only concerts in Spain by Mark Knopfler and Roger Waters in a town in Granada. People in the industry said: but what is this? where did they come from?” Riff Productions was born in 1994 in Cazorla (Jaén) “by instinct, with her nails”, and for several years now, from her current office in Córdoba is the music promoter that sells the most tickets in Spainabove the best-known multinationals.
in 2022 dispatched 731,472 ticketsnumber one in the ranking in Spain and 53 worldwide, according to figures from the magazine Pollstarthanks to the tours of Manuel Carrasco, Serrated, melendi, Daniel Martin, Miguel Poveda, Robe o Old Morla, among others, until producing more than 500 concerts and various festivals. His story is not only that of an American dream with an Andalusian accent but, with his commitment to pop and rock veterans, throws an accurate x-ray of the type of music that sells today in Spain while drawing a portrait of the changes in Spanish society over the last three decades, from the culture of the ball to the bursting of the real estate bubble, from the lockdown of the pandemic to the massive gatherings of recent months.
“Our history has literature, it is a good story,” he says Carlos Espinosa, who runs the company with Christopher Ortiz. The conversation is by phone, but we feel how he accommodates himself to tell, for the first time for the media beyond an interview in local newspapers in Andalusia (“We are the discreet resistance”he says), the story of a company that began as a passion, his, that of a music-loving journalist who satisfied his cravings by programming music at night on the radio, and who out of an instinct “more fan than business” decided to set up a festival of blues in Cazorla in the mid-90s, to which not even a thousand people attended. “As good promoters we lost money, but luckily we didn’t go bankrupt.” So they went on. and that festival the BluesCazorla, is today a benchmark of the genre throughout the world.
In the fifth edition, it began to grow. By then Espinosa had signed the only guy in Cazorla who spoke English, so he could negotiate contracts with artists like Johnny Winter, Solomon Burke o Canned Heat. “Chris -his partner of his today in command- is from New York, it was necessary to talk to the foreigners, I told him help me that I have no fucking idea.” That was decisive, it opened doors for them, they began to make international contacts thanks to the connection of Christoper Ortiz, beyond the language, with the culture and idiosyncrasies of foreign managers. “It’s like if you’re going to do a fandango festival in the United States and you find one in Huelva. Man, you’re my man.”
When artists from abroad went to the festival, they were asked to organize tours to other cities in Spain. “And how is that done?”, they wondered. But they did. They contacted the theaters, negotiated the rent… “Everything was absolutely domestic, but it turned out well.” And they were offered bigger names, in more places across the country. “That’s how we started, almost shoving, without having any idea of what was happening,” acknowledges the businessman.