Today, the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival is known for its exorbitant prices, eye-catching outfits, and influencers galore (and perhaps the music).
But the festival’s beginnings in 1999 were far from the money-making machine it is today. In fact, it was just the opposite.
The origins of the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival began as a protest by rock band Pearl Jam.
Watch the video above.
The band famously boycotted Ticketmaster and its events in Los Angeles, claiming their service charges were too high.
They sought to create their own event which brought prices down for fans, and found a viable venue in the Empire Polo Club in Indio, California, located in the Coachella Valley.
The band worked with concert promoters Rick Van Santen and Paul Tollett and the latter’s company, Goldenvoice to pull off their 1993 Vs. Tour in California. It ended up being a huge success, with the band performing to 25,000 fans.
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This gave Tollett the proof the desert venue was suitable for large events, and he soon began brainstorming what else could be held there.
In the 1980s, he had made his career on booking acts that may not have necessarily scaled the charts but continued to be trendy, and thought, ‘Maybe if you put a bunch of them together, that might be a magnet for a lot of people,’ per an interview with Desert Sun.
He sought to replicate large-scale music festivals that were popular abroad, such as Glastonbury or Reading in the UK, but while trading in the gloomy weather for the sunny desert of Southern California.
Tollett told Billboard in 2012, “We wanted it to be far. So you surrender. So you can’t leave your house and see a couple bands and be back home that night.
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“We want you to go out there, get tired, and curse the show by Sunday afternoon. That sunset, and that whole feeling of Coachella hits you.”
The festival made its debut in October 1999 with headliners such as Beck, Tool, and Rage Against the Machine, along with many other acts like Morrissey, Underworld and Jurassic 5.
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Tickets were a mere $50 a day, and it was named festival of the year by Pollstar.
But on the flip side, it was a disaster. The California festival had taken place two months after Woodstock 1999, and the violence, looting, arson, and sexual assaults from the latter festival cast a shadow on the new one.
Goldenvoice lost about $850,000 on the project and they ended up skipping 2000s run to come back bigger and better in 2001 as a single-day event.
Coachella aimed to be everything Woodstock was not, offering free water fountains, misting tents and bathrooms galore, trying to create a “high-comfort festival experience”.
Almost 30 years on, it seems it has taken that label literally.
The festival built its name by being a tastemaker, curating well-known and up-and-coming artists and creating many historic moments, such as reuniting the Pixies in 2004, Daft Punk’s 2006 pyramid set, Björk becoming the first female headliner in 2007, and more.
These moments, built over decades, earned them credibility with artists who were there to simply play music.
As its popularity grew, so did the budget, and soon huge names such as Prince, Jay-Z, Paul McCartney, Kanye West headlined the festival. It also saw more historic moments, such as Beyonce’s performance in 2018, making her the first Black woman to headline the show.
Coachella’s rise also coincided with the invent of social media and influencer culture, with the 2010s becoming the prime time for brands to experiment with live experiences and the online world.
Soon, traditional tastemakers such as A-listers Vanessa Hudgens or the Kardashians and Jenners were being infiltrated by ordinary people who had randomly found fame online.
Fast forward to the 2020s, and the festival has refined itself into a fine-tuned ecosystem of brand activations, celebrities and influencers alike spruiking their latest product, festival fashion, and at times, the music.
In fact, I can bet most of us are watching the going-ons of the festival from our phone screens, on the Instagram stories of our favourite influencers who got sponsored to go by any number of brands, or even the live stream Coachella has set up – allowing all the people at home who can’t afford to go to get a taste of the experience that was once made for them.
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