Welcome to I Am Your Target Demographic and welcome to this week’s What Is video, focusing
on the music festival known as Coachella.
This video is intended for people that don’t quite know what it is or why it’s such a
big deal, so let’s start at the beginning.
Back in the late 90s, Ticketmaster had a near monopoly on ticket sales and was criticized
for price gauging on its big stadium shows.
Promotion company Goldenvoice booked a venue out in the desert of California for the band
Pearl Jam, where they’d play a protest concert against Ticketmaster.
They picked this site out in Indio, California, located in what’s called the Coachella Valley.
This concert was a success and proved that this venue was viable.
Goldenvoice wanted to do more there but couldn’t compete with what companies like Ticketmaster
could pay artists, so started a music festival approach of lumping many bands in together
and hoping that sheer quantity could make it profitable.
The first actual Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival took place in 1999, headlined
by Beck, Tool, Morrisey, and Rage Against the Machine.
While a critical success, this first year also lost Goldenvoice about $850,000.
One of the reasons that they were able to survive was that some of these major headliners
agreed to receive what’s called deferred compensation, when Goldenvoice was able to
actually pay them.
Tickets for this first year cost $50 for a two-day concert.
Over time the festival evolved and grew to a three-day concert, taking place on a Friday,
Saturday, and Sunday.
Musically, the festival embraced a variety of genres, allowing visitors to head to different
stages based on their interests.
Goldenvoice even branched out to a second festival called Stagecoach, which took place
in the same venue but focused on country music.
The venue needed to host more than one big event a year to remain profitable, so efforts
were made to create new and different types of shows there throughout the year.
Attendance for these shows was skyrocketing, with 2009 drawing over 200,000 attendees.
The city of Indio and the Coachella Valley as a whole was suffering a bit from this sort
of traffic, so Goldenvoice invested in the area by paying for an additional lane in nearby
highways and did a major overhaul of lighting and security to make the venue safer and more secure.
In 2012, the next major change hit.
The tickets were selling out, so Goldenvoice made a risky move by expanding to two weekends,
with identical lineups.
Both weekends sold out in under three hours.
2012 also marked the appearance of a deceased Tupac Shakur, who appeared as a hologram onstage
during a set for Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg.
Ticket sales were up and the festival was incredibly profitable now.
Goldenvoice and the city of Indio agreed to keep the festival there at least through the
year 2030, with the city taking $5 of each ticket sold.
Let’s look at the numbers now.
For 2017, tickets again sold out almost immediately and drew about 250,000 attendees and the festival
brought in about $115 million dollars.
That's $429 a ticket for the entire weekend.
Now, we’ve focused on music but the festival also includes all sorts of art installations,
including visual art, interactive displays and exhibits, and giant sculptures.
Due to the sort of exposure these artists receive at the festival, it’s becoming just
as important for artists as the festival is for musicians.
Let’s zoom out a bit.
In addition to the music stages and the art displays, guests can also camp in tents on
the site for the three days.
People can wander back and forth from their tents to the main stages and activities.
With this many people, both in the camping area and the main venue, that will inevitably
lead to an excess of trash.
Goldenvoice is committed to sustainability though and hires about 600 staff to collect
litter throughout the event, most of which is separated and sent to recycling if possible.
So that’s the basic gist of Coachella.
It’s a three-day festival that occurs two consecutive weekends in the desert of California.
If you’ve been, share your experiences in the comments.
If you haven’t, are you interested in going?
Thanks for watching!