The innovation in the cultural sector has been poorly studied and there are fewer studies on festivals, when they are cultural events that often have a significant impact on the regions in which they occur. In this paper we have analyzed the early music festivals grouped in a European association to find out if they produce specific innovations and which groups of stakeholders are the most influential in the development of their innovations. The results show that in such festivals occur some innovations, which are different from those that take place in the other kind of festivals; also there have been identified some stakeholders involved on these innovations that had not been identified in previous studies in spite of being influential. This is due to the uniqueness of this kind of music, highly dependent on musicological research, oriented to a minority audience and related to cities with prominent historical and artistic heritage and musicological tradition.