Coachella Expands Festival Dates To Two Weekends, Moneyed Hipsters Rejoice
posted in: Music News
Coachella, that most venerable of the West Coast independent music festivals, made blog headlines this past week when they announced that they were expanding their musical festivities an extra three days. The unprecedented part of this move? The now six day festival is spread out over TWO WEEKENDS. That’s right, two.
Six days of this? Eh, wouldn't be so bad, I guess.
From an official statement on Coachella’s site, the aim of this new measure is “an effort to try and accommodate everyone who wants to experience the festival” thus prevent anything like what happened with this year’s blazingly fast sellout of passes. So, instead of potentially expanding the lineup accordingly, creating some sort of super festival megalith, they’re replicating the same experience for both weekends with identical lineups and schedules. In case you don’t know what a weekend at Coachella can be like, you can check out some highlights from this year’s festival below.
Coachella 2011 from Hidden Horizons on Vimeo.
At first blush, you’re probably thinking, “Well, great! I won’t miss any of my favorite acts and I won’t have to be huddled in front of my computer the moment passes are announced.” FYI: for all you early birds, Advanced Sale tickets have already been made available this past Friday and will be on sale until June 10th at 10pm PST, and depending on how soon you read this post, they might already be sold out. This year’s festival, with an added emphasis on security and crowd safety, had up to 105,000 total attendants”if you count concert goers, security, Coachella staff and the bands themselves”and up to 90,000 festival attendees. That about matches the attendance set by 2010’s iteration, which drew 15,000 more attendants than the year before. So, on that level, the move makes sense: they can’t really make the festival any bigger in its current incarnation since they can’t expand the number of bands or the number of hours in the day. But, they can make the whole experience bigger in scope if not size, and allow even more people the experience.
Who does this really help, you may ask? Well, it’s a tough economy. You buy your tickets now and you’ll be able to take advantage of the payment plan or pay upfront the discounted three day passes at $269. Not chump change, folks. Wouldn’t that be something, if the rock fest made itself a little cheaper, a little more affordable for Joe IndieRockFan or Mary AlternativeMusicLover. But alas, it’s the reality of economics. You want something at that scale, you’re going to have to live with the fact that you’re going to be contending with hipster celebs for a chance at tickets.
But there’s always a silver lining, thanks to good, old American capitalism. After all, Coachella made a big splash with their announcement, which just boils down to the fact that they’re selling twice the number of tickets this year then they did last year. It’s a great way to build buzz for the Advance Sale tickets and to keep their presence felt until next April. So, if you’re one of the big indie rock fests in the US and worldwide, you might feel the need to compete. If the festivals could be nudged to get into a game of one-upmanship with one another, then guess who wins? Us, the fans.
How awesome would it be if Bonnaroo tried to outdo Coachella by stretching their own marathon four day festival into another two with even more bands added to the lineup? What if Austin City Limits added even more out of the way and unconventional venues (if they didn’t alienate every Austin city resident in the process, that is) to their already diverse offering of places for bands to play? Or if Sasquatch dropped their ticket prices to start a good, old-fashioned price war? It could be a beautiful thing, people. But until any of this happens, we can only dream. Consider Coachella’s statement the opening salvo summer festival set hype war. And so, folks, before it all starts spiraling out of control and you have to decide whether to trek out to sunny Cali, bustling Austin, the gorgeously scenic Gorge in Washington or the muddy, messy fun in Tennessee, start saving up. Those three day passes ain’t cheap.