Music, led by reggaeton, reigns supreme in the cultural bonus for young people.

Four years ago, Pedro Sánchez announced the creation of a youth cultural voucher, following the example already introduced in countries like Italy and France.

The goal was twofold: to boost cultural consumption again after the difficult months of the pandemic, and to do so by opening up new opportunities for young people to access the cultural world, creating new audiences.

After a difficult start, with significant difficulties registering for the voucher, which offers €400 in cultural spending to young people turning 18, the numbers have solidified, and there are now figures and percentages showing what the youth cultural voucher has meant over the years.

And there's no shortage of striking figures, such as the nearly four million euros that the Reggaeton Beach Festival received from the 2023 youth cultural bonus, the last call for applications with complete data, as beneficiaries have one year to spend the 400 euros and there are still almost six months until the 2024 call.

In the same 2023 edition, the Boombastic festival secured €1.5 million from the grant, while others such as the Zevra Festival and Arenal Sound earned more than €800,000.

Music is undoubtedly the king of the three grant applications so far, capturing, according to estimates from the Ministry of Culture, 31.5% of the funds invested. This is no surprise, and not just because of the interest young people have in major festivals.

The Spanish voucher was created as an attempt to correct some of the problems identified in countries like France, where the culture pass was once called the manga voucher due to the large expenditures many young people made on Japanese comics. To avoid this and diversify cultural consumption in Spain, Miquel Iceta's Ministry of Culture decided to divide the voucher into categories and dedicate the largest portion, €200 of the €400, to live culture, whether concerts, festivals, theater, dance, or museums.

Festivals like Reggaeton Beach, Boombastic or Zevra are among the most popular.

Another hundred would be for culture in physical formats, from books to newspapers, magazines, and sheet music, and the last hundred for culture in digital formats, such as subscriptions to audiovisual, music, or video game platforms, or digital newspapers and magazines.

After losing a lawsuit in court, the ministry had to add bullfighting to the cultural bonus, which in the 2023 call, according to estimates from the Ministry of Culture, accounted for 0.29% of spending.

After music, books and comics have been the second most popular destination for the voucher over the past three years, accounting for 16.9% of the total, according to data available to the ministry. Audiovisual platforms take third place with 15.3%, and video games account for 12.5%.

By place of purchase, large stores where many of the voucher categories can be purchased and specialized stores take the lion's share, with Fnac being the undisputed leader, with 17 million in revenue in the 2023 call, followed by El Corte Inglés, Casa del Libro, and Game video game stores.

Numerous ticketing companies are at the top of the list, from Enterticket to Ticketmaster, Eventim, and Dice FM.

Film exhibitors such as Cinesa and Yelmo also make it into the main ranking, as do subscriptions to platforms such as Netflix, Movistar+, and Disney+.

That's among thousands of small bookstores, stationery stores, and movie theaters across the country that scrape together anywhere from a few hundred to thousands of euros with the voucher.

A bond that has represented a significant and growing investment: 71.9 million in the 2022 call, 87.9 million in the 2023 call, and 63.3 million in the 2024 call, despite the months remaining until it closes.

A voucher that has stabilized its applicants at around two-thirds of the 18-year-old population: due to ignorance or lack of interest, a third have yet to apply for the 400 euros.

Thus, in 2024, 334,429 young people applied for it, 63.7% of the 525,095 who were eligible. By gender, as is often the case in culture, there are differences: 66.4% of women applied compared to 61.2% of men.

A voucher that allows for different cultural spending in each country: in Italy, the voucher money cannot be spent on video games, but it can be spent on music or theater classes. In Spain, it's the other way around.

For Jazmín Beirak, Director General of Cultural Rights at the Ministry of Culture, "the goal is to support the sector as a whole, and we'll see what people consume as much as possible." She adds that the ministry "needs to be more concerned about ensuring the voucher reaches the largest possible number of young people, and we still have plenty of room for growth. The changes we're considering have to do with strengthening access for the most vulnerable segments of the population. And we're looking at our capacity to promote small businesses. The voucher was designed to incorporate incentives for cultural consumption and to broaden the initial consumption trends of young people, and I think it's proving to be a very useful tool in both of these areas."