Coachella Festival

It all started with a grunge band boycott. The festival traces its roots back to 1993 when Pearl Jam decided to boycott venues controlled by Ticketmaster and chose to play a show at the Empire Polo Club in Indio, proving the desert site could actually host massive crowds.

The first official festival was a financial disaster. When the very first Coachella took place in 1999, tickets were only fifty dollars, but the organizers lost hundreds of thousands of dollars and actually had to cancel the event the following year.

The Tupac hologram changed live music forever. In 2012, Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg shocked the entire world by performing alongside a hyper-realistic, life-sized projection of the late Tupac Shakur, sparking a massive trend in digital artist resurrections.

Beyonce made history in the desert. In 2018, the legendary singer became the very first Black woman to ever headline the festival, delivering a culturally monumental performance that fans instantly renamed Beychella.

The headliner payouts are absolutely astronomical. While early performers played for relatively small fees, today’s biggest headliners can negotiate payouts of eight to ten million dollars just for playing two weekends in the desert.

The city is incredibly strict about bedtime. The city of Indio enforces a rigid midnight curfew on weekends, and the festival gets slapped with a fine of one thousand dollars for every single minute a headliner plays past the cutoff.

They doubled the weekends to meet insane demand. In 2012, the festival became so incredibly popular that organizers decided to host the exact same lineup over two consecutive weekends, paving the way for maximum ticket sales.

The Ferris wheel is a record breaker. The iconic Le Grande Wheel that lights up the desert sky is actually one of the largest transportable Ferris wheels in the entire world, requiring multiple massive trucks just to move it.

The festival grounds are strictly grass. Because the venue is an active, high-end polo club during the rest of the year, organizers spend millions of dollars keeping the grass perfectly manicured and hydrated right up until the gates open.

Influencer parties rival the actual festival. Many celebrities and online influencers travel to the desert but never actually step foot inside the festival, preferring instead to attend highly exclusive, brand-sponsored mansion parties in the surrounding areas.

Daft Punk built a legendary pyramid. In 2006, the secretive French electronic duo performed inside a massive, glowing LED pyramid, a performance that is widely considered one of the greatest and most influential sets in dance music history.

The artist riders are totally bizarre. Backstage demands are legendary, ranging from specific room temperatures and pure white leather couches to perfectly spherical ice cubes and entirely vegan catering stations for massive entourages.

The art installations are temporary marvels. Coachella commissions giant, interactive art pieces and sculptures every year, which are specifically designed to provide shade during the blazing hot days and light up dramatically at night.

It started as a punk rock promotion company. The massive company behind the festival, Goldenvoice, originally started in the 1980s as an independent promoter trying to book underground punk rock bands in small Los Angeles clubs.

Camping is essentially a small city. Over a hundred thousand people camp out on the festival grounds in tents and cars, requiring the organizers to build a temporary infrastructure with general stores, showers, and even yoga studios.