Coachella, the long-lasting music festival held within the California desert, has raised eyebrows for all of the flawed reasons this 12 months, leading some to query its long-term viability. But experts weighed in on Coachella’s poor performance and spoke to him. Newsweek About the broader state of the music festival industry.
In 2023, it was the primary time in 11 years that the festival didn’t sell out on each of its weekends, and this 12 months it took a full month for the primary weekend to sell out. Considering the past few years tickets have sold out anywhere. Between 40 minutes and 4 hourssome have begun to wonder what has made Coachella less popular than it once was.
Even rumors of Taylor Swift attending this 12 months’s festival with recent beau Travis Kelce in April did not boost sales.
Some fans criticized the lineup, which included headliners Lana Del Rey, Tyler the Creator and Duja Cat, and even a reunion of Nineties megaband No Doubt, and blamed low sales.
Newsweek GoldenVoice reached out to Coachella organizers via email but didn’t receive a response on the time of publication.
Coachella began in 1999 and has grow to be not only the most important festival within the US, but in addition essentially the most famous festival on the planet. Apart from its cultural impact – it also hosts art installations away from the music stages – the festival is also an economic juggernaut.
On average, about 125,000 people attend Coachella per day over its two weekends, and in 2019 it grossed greater than $114 million in gross receipts, in accordance with market data site, Gitnux. In 2011, it was estimated that Coachella generated $704 million for the local economy and created roughly 5,000 recent jobs every year.
It is also great for tourism. In 2019, 22.6 percent of participants got here from overseas.
Traditionally, Coachella was so popular that many individuals bought their tickets before seeing the year-round lineup.
“What makes a festival good is that people want to go back,” explains Vito Valentinetti, co-founder of Music Festival Wizard, a web site that informs people about events around the globe. Newsweek.
“A lot of the best festivals are about the experience and the atmosphere. There are a lot of festivals where people will buy a ticket without knowing what the line-up is, like Glastonbury in the UK.”
Valentini explained that the slowdown in Coachella sales could also be unusual, but that he’s “not at all worried” about its future. But he suggests organizers may have to re-evaluate its sustainability as a two-weekend event and reconsider having the identical lineup over each weekends.
He cites issues like the price of living crisis as an enormous consider forcing people to be more savvy about how they spend their money.
“Coachella is not a cheap festival,” he says of the entry-level price of $599 for general admission. It doesn’t matter the price of lodging, because camping and traveling to Coachella’s distant site on the Empire Polo Club in Indio, California, is not.
That’s an enormous hurdle for music author and festival expert Jameson Scarcella, who, as a Gen-Z within the early days of his profession, couldn’t justify the price of even a day on the festival. can
“The biggest problem for Coachella is just that it’s getting too expensive,” he explains. Newsweek.
“First of all, California is very expensive to start. To get to Coachella you can fly into Los Angeles and then drive four hours, or you can fly into Palm Springs but for It costs a lot of money. To be able to go to a hotel festival, then there’s the cost of food, so it’s impossible for some people.”
It’s a “huge commitment of time, money and logistics,” says Scarcella.
This 12 months’s festival has also been interrupted by what Scarcella has described because the “Frank Ocean debacle” of 2023, with the singer giving a rare performance that the author described as a “lock-lister”. Ocean then pulled out of the second weekend citing injury, leaving fans indignant and upset.
Both Scarsella and Valentinetti have observed that as a substitute of shelling out big bucks to attend Coachella, many music fans are selecting to attend smaller, more local festivals. Some persons are even using it as a reason to travel abroad for a wealthy cultural experience.
“I actually benefit from the travel aspect of it… In general, it’s the primary time I’ve been to a festival in most of Europe and it’s an interesting strategy to dive in and not only be a typical tourist. site,” explains Valentini.
What’s happening with Coachella isn’t necessarily symptomatic of a broader problem in the music festival scene. While many have been hit by high production costs and punters are struggling with the cost of living, the festival industry is still doing well.
John Rostron is Chief Executive of the Association of Independent Festivals (AIF), the UK’s leading festival representative body.
Many of its members, even the big festivals that host 80,000 people, are doing well but he admitted that “Coachella is probably anxious” about its poor ticket sales. He points out that this may have to do with some of the negative stereotypes the festival has received in recent years, including the rise of social media influencers who are believed to be the event’s influencers. are dominating and reducing its intensity.
“Coachella never gets more favorable coverage here. [in the U.K]. From here, it looks like a pretty light offering and it doesn’t look like some of the smaller festivals we have that are full of color and variety, with all kinds of people,” Rostron said. Let’s see, it doesn’t look particularly interesting.”
The after-effects of the Covid-19 pandemic are still being felt and AIF research found that one in six festivals were permanently canceled because of it.
Rostron also points out that many young people aren’t as comfortable hanging out in large crowds as previous generations. Rostron explains that the coronavirus has “modified what people want from their experience.”
For example, what does Gen Z want? Less alcohol and more healthy experiences When attending music festivals, many people are forced to rethink what they present to the audience.
It’s something Scarcella can certainly relate to as one of the many Gen-Zs who missed out on early social experiences due to the pandemic.
“Most Gen-Z people want it to be reasonably priced, have quite a lot of artists and be logistically accessible,” he says.
But people in the post-pandemic world will also be feeling the fatigue as they rush to get back to normal life, including musicians eager to get back on the road.
“There was such a rush after the pandemic and everybody was so excited to get back at it, and each artist was able to get back on tour, and it gave the look of every part was great again,” Valentini said. says, “But now, I feel it’s pulling it back a bit of bit.”
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