Coachella 2025 kicks off with scorching weather and cooling demand
Two decades of bumper lineups and boho energy later, does America’s most profitable festival need a vibe check?
In case you missed an onset of sun-baked valleys, brand-sponsored stages, bandana-wearing influencers, and cryptic artist billboards cropping up on your Instagram feeds, Coachella 2025 starts today.
This year, headliners Lady Gaga, Post Malone, Green Day, and Travis Scott will take to the main stage over two April weekends in the desert, where the weather is expected to reach triple digits. For those who don’t want to brave the 100-degree heat, performances will be available to watch on the new Coachella Livestream app, made in partnership with YouTube — as well on the video platform itself, which has been the exclusive streamer of the festival since 2011.
However, those looking to hit the Valley itself this month to catch their favourite artists still can. As it stands, the festival is not yet sold out, in stark contrast to the ’00s and ’10s, when wristbands would be snapped up in a matter of days or even minutes. This follows 2024, when ticket sales were the slowest they’d been in 10 years, and weekend passes went for below face value on resale sites.
Dust settles
So, after a few golden decades of flower crowns and face glitter, are the Coachella vibes, typically the festival’s most valuable currency, finally fading?
Search queries for “coachella” first spiked in 2012 — when the event was held over two weekends, Instagram was just starting to blow up, and a surprise Tupac hologram joined Snoop Dogg onstage — before peaking in 2018, the year that the historic “Beychella” performance took place. Since then, though, online interest has slumped, with postpandemic years progressively declining in search volume.
While some have pointed to Coachella’s over-corporatization as a reason for the slowdown, a similar trend can be seen across several other popular US festivals, like Bonnaroo, Lollapalooza, and South by Southwest. Dual peaks are seen annually for most festivals, when tickets are released and then again when it takes place, but most just aren’t building the same hype in recent years that they did in decades prior.
Break camp
One notable exception is Burning Man, which saw online interest peak in 2023 after flash flooding left techno-heads stranded — but attendance figures from the festival have also waned. Perhaps in the postpandemic world, a few disastrous festivals and some healthy livestreams are enough to convince people to just tune in from the comfort of their homes... That said, Live Nation just had its best year for attendance ever, and Fyre Fest 2 is inexplicably on the cards.
