Inside Coachella: The Business Behind America’s Most Iconic Music Festival

The first weekend of Coachella is here: Bad Bunny, BLACKPINK, and Frank Ocean will headline for 2023. Coachella is expected to gross well over $100 million with over 100,000+ attendees per day.

In this episode, broke it all down withMIDiA Research’s Tati Cirisano. Coachella started in 1999 as a niche festival for indie rock and quickly morphed into the biggest brand-name festival in the United States. These days, the Coachella brand is big enough to sell the experience itself, regardless of who’s performing — a rarity in the festival business.

Tati and I discuss why that is, the implications, and what the future of Coachella could hold. Here’s what we hit on:

0:20 Coachella’s brand sells itself
2:30 Festival’s origin story
530 Advantages and disadvantages of performing at Coachella
8:35 Success by the numbers
11:05 Coachella bump for brands, influencers, and local economy
13:35 Untapped opportunities for future Coachellas
19:37 How individual music show prices influence festival attendance
25:09 Artists that are above playing Coachella
27:48 The festival that’s the antithesis of Coachella
33:08 Festival lineups becoming homogeneous
41:41 Predicting Coachella’s 2024 headliners

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