Coachella goes live in three days! Will you be there?
The Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival has been the single most sought-after, talked-about event for the last eighteen years. Music lovers from around the world gather annually under the blistering heat of the Colorado Desert sun to celebrate art and culture, and most importantly, to have the best time of their lives. The subsequent pictures and memories will remain a source of envy to anyone with the misfortune of not attending, for the rest of eternity.
Credit: Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival
The first Coachella event took place in 1999, but the seed that bore the fruit we all so treasure and covet was planted almost six years earlier. In 1993, the band Pearl Jam held a concert in protest of what they considered outrageous Ticketmaster surcharges. The Empire Polo Club, in Indio, California was their destination of choice. This would be the first ever rock show to have taken place at this sort of outdoor desert venue, and would open the door to future events of the very sort. Events like Coachella.
Coachella was founded by a man named Paul Tollett. His events company, Goldenvoice, of which he is the C.E.O, held the first of many Coachellas to come over the span of two days, drawing a horde of about twenty thousand people to a single day. The first couple of years for the fest were not the most promising, but when the festival returned in 2004, the tickets sold out for the first time in history.
Credit: Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival
The Coachella we all know and love is divided over the course of two weekends and comprises of about seven main stages and numerous smaller attractions and installations. However, there was a time when the event was an attraction that lasted only a mere day. By 2012, Coachella had become so popular that Goldenvoice instated a second weekend of the festival, with the same line-up performing on the consecutive weekends. Last year, the festival broke its own attendance record, attracting a crowd of two hundred thousand, and surmounting in a record-breaking eighty-four million dollars total. This year’s festival, which goes live in three days, reportedly sold out an hour after tickets went on sale.
Credit: Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival
The festival boasts its individuality in terms of its unique, somewhat vague ideology and represents a vast array of genres. The festival has been reckoned a pillar of the post-grunge period when hard rock still dominated the mainstream and has grown and evolved over the years as the trends in music did. Not constrained by the limitations of one genre, the festival has grown to incorporate more hip-hop and dance acts, while still maintaining their reputation of supporting artists of diverse and niche genres. This sort of countercultural thinking is what separates Coachella from other festivals of its kind, and is the very reason it has gained the respect and reputation it holds amongst music lovers of every category.
Credit: Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival
This year’s line-up is set to include artists like Radiohead, Lady Gaga, Kendrick Lamar, The XX and Martin Garrix amongst its various other notable attractions, and promises another year of unique experiences and memories; the likes of which cannot be rivaled.
So, do you have your tickets ready? Check out the first weekend and second weekend event page here for more details.