Coachella
Coachella (officially called the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival and sometimes known as Coachella Festival) is an annual music and arts festival held at the Empire Polo Club in Indio, California, in the Coachella Valley in the Colorado Desert. It was co-founded by Paul Tollett and Rick Van Santen in 1999, and is organized by Goldenvoice, a subsidiary of AEG Presents.[2] The event features musical artists from many genres of music, including rock, pop, indie, hip hop and electronic dance music, as well as art installations and sculptures. Across the grounds, several stages continuously host live music.
This article is about the festival. For other uses, see Coachella (disambiguation).Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival
Consecutive 3-day weekends in April (currently)
1999, 2001–2019, 2022–present
Paul Tollett and Rick Van Santen
250,000 (2017, two-weekend total)
125,000[1]
The festival's origins trace back to a 1993 concert that Pearl Jam performed at the Empire Polo Club while boycotting venues controlled by Ticketmaster. The show validated the site's viability for hosting large events, leading to the inaugural Coachella Festival being held over the course of two days in October 1999, three months after Woodstock '99. After no event was held in 2000, Coachella returned on an annual basis beginning in April 2001 as a single-day event. In 2002, the festival reverted to a two-day format. Coachella was expanded to a third day in 2007 and eventually a second weekend in 2012; it is now held on consecutive three-day weekends in April, with the same lineup each weekend. Organizers began permitting spectators to camp on the grounds in 2003, one of several expansions and additions in the festival's history. The festival was not held in 2020 and 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.[3]
Coachella showcases popular and established musical artists as well as emerging artists and reunited groups. It is one of the largest, most famous, and most profitable music festivals in the United States and the world.[4][5] Each Coachella staged from 2013 to 2015 set new records for festival attendance and gross revenues. The 2017 festival was attended by 250,000 people and grossed $114.6 million. Coachella's success led to Goldenvoice establishing additional music festivals at the site, including the annual Stagecoach country music festival beginning in 2007, the Big 4 thrash metal festival in 2011, and the classic rock-oriented Desert Trip in 2016.
Coachella takes place in Indio, California, located in the Inland Empire region's Coachella Valley within the Colorado Desert. Temperatures during the festival's history have ranged from 43 °F (6 °C) on April 14, 2012 to 106 °F (41 °C) on April 21, 2012.[138] The festival is hosted at the 78-acre Empire Polo Club;[139] when accounting for land used for parking and camping, the event covers a footprint of approximately 642 acres.[140] The site is about 125 miles (200 km) east of Los Angeles.[52]
During the festival, several stages continuously host live music. Two outdoor stages are used, along with several tents named after deserts.[141] The primary stages that have been in use since Coachella's inception are:
Additional performance areas have been added over time, including:
Tollett begins to book artists for each festival as early as the previous August. In addition to agent pitches and artists discovered online, the lineup is culled from acts booked by Goldenvoice for their other 1,800 shows each year. Tollett uses the promoter's ticketing figures for insight into whom to book, saying: "There are AEG shows all across the country, and I see all their show lists and ticket counts. So I see little things that are happening maybe before some others, because they don't have that data."[164] The booking process takes approximately six months.[9]
According to the Los Angeles Times, booking fees for most artists playing the festival allegedly start at $15,000 and extend into the "high six figures." Top-billed artists for 2010 were expected to receive over $1 million.[165] Billboard's sources estimated that non-headline acts can earn anywhere from $500 to $100,000.[164] According to a 2017 profile on Tollett in The New Yorker, that year's headlining performers received $3–4 million.[9] Beyoncé's 2018 performances and Ariana Grande's 2019 performances reportedly garnered them each $8 million.[166]
In booking the festival, Goldenvoice uses radius clauses that can prevent acts from performing in the vicinity of Coachella for a certain amount of time before and after the festival. The promoter has allowed some of Coachella's acts to make appearances in the region prior to the festival and between weekends, but only at events and venues owned or controlled by Goldenvoice's parent company AEG; one such example was Jay-Z's concert at Staples Center in 2010.[165][167][168] Goldenvoice now promotes these events, dubbed "Localchella", as a series of small warm-up shows for Coachella in Southern California.[169][170] In May 2018, AEG and its subsidiaries were sued by the Oregon-based Soul'D Out Festival for anti-competitive practices related to Coachella's radius clause. As part of the lawsuit, the clause's details were revealed. They stipulate that any artist performing at Coachella:[171][172]
Goldenvoice attempts to release the lineup poster as close to New Year's Day as possible, so that Coachella is the first major festival of the year to announce its lineup. This gives the promoter a competitive advantage over other festivals, many of which end up sharing headliners by the time they are all announced.[9] The Coachella lineup poster lists its music artists across several lines in gradually decreasing font sizes in descending order of prominence. The line on which an artist's name appears as well as their font size is a contentious topic between Goldenvoice and talent agents, as placement on the poster will often dictate an artist's future booking fee. Tollett said, "We have so many arguments over font sizes. I literally have gone to the mat over one point size."[9]