This festival season has already had an exciting kickoff with all the panic, drama, and more that came out of Coachella. Let’s dive in, shall we? Coachella started off as a small music festival meant to expose the youth to new and upcoming artists and bring a Woodstock-like festival to the next generation. Coachella is a festival held in Indio, California, not too far from Palm Springs and Joshua Tree. It is in an area that is home to desert-like conditions and fluctuating temperatures from day to night. It is in a place that many millennials and younger flock to for music, food, celebrity-sightings, and more.
After some initial hiccups, Coachella did not begin to take off in earnest until the late 2000s, when more celebrity mystique and an ethereal musical presence began to surround the festival. The festival started adding more and more headliners that were pop and mainstream while also keeping its indie and underground appeal for local and new artists on the outer stages of the festival. Since the 2000s, many well-known artists, musicians, and musical acts have performed on the Coachella main stage, including Beyonce, Lady Gaga, Harry Styles, Billie Ellish, The Weeknd, Ariana Grande, Tame Impala, and a plethora of other acts.
Getting a chance to be in a crowd with this much access to celebrity and celebrity culture really took the festival to another level, but what really cemented the festival in public consciousness was the invention and use of social media. Social media, both short-form and long-form, has stratified the event and made it even larger than life. Coachella is an ‘it’ event not just because of the sheer amount of proximity you get to celebrities but because attending it makes you a mini-celebrity in its own right. People love to talk (and brag) about going to Coachella, either on invitation or because they paid for the festival outright with their own money.
The pre-events to Coachella, like the Revolve festival and other influencer events, are just as much part of the music festival's charm and mystique as any other event sponsored directly by the festival. Not only that, but people, or audiences, live to see influencers having the time of their lives at the famed music festival. Videos featuring ‘getreadywithmes’, and ‘storytimes’ give the festival that human touch and element that if you go to Coachella, you will have a story to tell by the end of your time there.
But the festival has become a mixed bag over the past few years. The pandemic and our relationship with the economy have definitely changed how we view Coachella and other music festivals overall. This is the first full year that Coachella is back in full swing, with a heavy-hitter lineup and an explosive record attendance. For some, this is the Influencer Olympics, and many have been waiting for it. For others, the outlook isn’t as rosy. Many people who would have gone to Coachella, hyped a few years ago, now look at it with dread and as another chore.
But why have Coachella and other festivals, for that matter, slightly fallen out of favor?
And there are the topsy-turvy events that happen at the festival itself. For example, Frank Ocean performed to a jilted crowd during the first weekend of Coachella and promptly dropped out of the second part, citing injury. He was replaced by a popular 2000s band, Blink 182, but it still left many with more questions than answers, as many had patiently hoped to see his return and ascent back to the top in the music industry.
On the flip side, Bad Bunny and Black Pink, the other two headliners, killed their performances and exposed a variety of new people to new music. One of the interesting things about the headliners this particular year is the fact that these stars are global phenoms, not just artists known in the American circuit.
Even if you look at other artists in the line-up, you can see this year that Coachella, overall, has favored new and emerging acts. You can see that there were a lot of people who had a presence, such as Latto, GloRilla, Rosalia, and Kali Uchis, and are on their ascent to their full star potential. They are rising and growing and are people who will have full, illustrious careers over time which goes back to the heart of the festival in the first place- showcasing new and young artists to old and new fans.
But this brings us to another topic: maybe the truth of the matter is that many of us have aged out of Coachella and possibly Coachella in general?
In an article by a Coachella goer, it was reported how difficult it is to attend Coachella as a late twentysomething. The writer, who just turned 29, wrote about how Coachella was no longer for her as she suffered from chronic illness and did not want to be bothered with desert-like conditions, ‘Coachella Cough’, squeezing in among crowded stages, and standing out in the blazing sun. And the truth of the matter is that it is a very different experience going to Coachella as a bright-eyed 21-year-old versus a 29-year-old who has been on the circuit for a few years.
Many of this is just due to the fact that the older you get, the less physical, mental, and emotional energy you have for these types of festivals. You might not want to have to wait in line to get a shower on camp grounds when you are pushing 30. You might be over having sand and dust in your hair, being pushed around in crowds, and having a hard time finding decently priced food. You might also find it harder to convince a group of friends to go with you.
When you are 21 and have the same or similar schedule as your friends, it is easy to pool in and buy tickets, knowing that you are fine camping in the back of your friend’s camper van or splitting the cheapest Airbnb near the grounds. At 31, your friends might have their own plans made—weddings to attend, baby showers, trips abroad, family gatherings, you name it. Plus, the whole camping in the dust thing might not appeal to you as an experience that you want to partake in the older you get (but as a side note, there are plenty of thirty-something and forty-somethings that attend Coachella that have an awesome and grand ole time).
Another factor in all this is the fact that Coachella is a costly endeavor. Festivals in general are costly endeavors. The people who are lucky enough to attend will most likely have hundreds and thousands of dollars to spend to attend, not only on tickets but also on accommodations, food, festival wear, and the like. And those who don’t are most likely not attending. Influencers do get flown out to attend these events, but it is their job to promote whichever company is sponsoring them to attend. And that means it's a work trip, not just a fun and free trip, even though it might seem like that on the gram. A subtle truth about Coachella and how many influencers don’t actually go to the festival, but rather take pictures at an Airbnb in the desert and fake the appearance of going there. And there are stories about those who did attend but realized that the experience was too much for them and dipped out early due to mental health reasons.
Have we all just outgrown Coachella?
Coachella is just the start of festival season, not even close to the end of it. We still have Rolling Loud, Outside Lands, Bonnaroo, Lollapalooza, Gov. Ball, and more coming up next. Then there are niche concerts, big concerts, and other smaller backyard and hometown festivals too. There is truly a little something for everyone. Though, looking at the call and response surrounding Coachella leads me to think it is too early to say if ‘we’ as a collective have outgrown Coachella. It is still one of the biggest and most influential music festivals of our time. It is still a hit-maker and accelerator for many artists careers. Many artists that are now household names got their start and growth from playing at or headlining Coachella, and young and new artists alike still dream of playing in the desert on the big stage in front of thousands of adoring fans. And people will still go. Many of the youth will still go and take pictures, sing, dance, and be in musical commune. Attending a live festival with all of its magic is still a transformative experience that many will seek out.
But the unspoken truth is that it might not be for ‘us’ anymore, and by ‘us," I mean millennials. We millennials are not the target demographic, even though we aren’t far from the target demographic anymore, and that is something to grapple with in its own right. That is not to say there is a time limit or an age limit to going to festivals, but it is something to contend with that we, as millennials, are no longer in the age bracket that will truly enjoy these festivals, especially after being in the target demographic for so long. We are the ones who are still curating culture, writing think pieces, and figuring our space out, but we are not the only ones being catered too.
And because the landscape of everything is changing rapidly, we probably won’t hear about Coachella as much as we did a decade ago because our friends and our circle have grown up. We have moved on to other things, other festivals, and other ways of life. We are also catching up with all the things we haven’t been able to really do over the last three years, and many people are cramming in as much fun as they possibly can before moving on to the next thing and the next thing and the next. And as we live in an increasingly individualized world, that means there are more silos and less ‘appointment events’.
So Coachella might be something that will be on the back burner for some of us, but it's not a festival that will be forgotten, or at least not anytime soon.