Is The Festival Market Soft? Are Genre Fests The Future?

It finally happened.

At 2:38 p.m. on Feb. 15, the official Coachella account on X (formerly Twitter) announced the first weekend of the seminal festival, scheduled for April 12-14 at the Empire Polo Club in Indio, California, was sold out.

For those scoring at home, that’s 27 days, four hours and eight minutes after going onsale, far longer than the past. The world was accustomed to Coachella selling out even before the lineup was announced. Even in 2023, eyebrows went skyward that it took all of four days. A year later, it was almost four weeks.

There was a great bit of hand-wringing and think-piecing  — some of which was likely just concern-trolling — while the world waited for Weekend One to sell out.

At Pollstar Live!, a little more than a week before the sellout was announced, Rich Schaefer — President of Global Touring at AEG Presents, the corporate parent of Coachella promoter Goldenvoice — dismissed concerns that his company’s most prominent event was “troubled.”

“Coachella’s sold out every year for God knows how many years. The reason you’re seeing those stories — ‘it didn’t sell out on the onsale’ — is that we have set such a high standard. If other festivals had the numbers ‘tanking Coachella’ had, they’d be thrilled,” he said.

And of course, there’s a measure of truth there. Ultimately, the goal is selling tickets and as long as they are sold before the gates are thrown open in the desert, there’s very little difference if 125,000 tickets sold in 40 minutes or four weeks.

And Schaefer is right in another way: the attention Coachella gets is because the festival is the gold standard. Anything less than instantaneous feels like a catastrophe for the festival that conventional wisdom treats as the tablesetter for all the others. So perhaps things aren’t as bad as they feel, but as the conversation around the broader economy has demonstrated for the last year, the vibes don’t always match the reality.

And the vibe around the massive, genre-crossing festivals that became culturally iconic in the last quarter century — Coachella, Bonnaroo, Lollapalooza and others — is that things aren’t what they used to be, even in a post-pandemic live entertainment universe that sets records at every turn.

Allen Scott, president of venues and festivals for Another Planet Entertainment, says there was a marked difficulty in finding bill-toppers for his company’s Outside Lands at San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, which, in recent years, has been topped by Foo Fighters, Kendrick Lamar, Green Day, Janet Jackson and SZA (who is appearing on seemingly every festival bill in 2024).

“This has been one of the more difficult years in terms of booking headliners for Outside Lands,” Scott says. “And it feels like our particular time period is really tough. We put together what I think is a really good lineup, but it was definitely, definitely challenging this year.”

The live industry’s overall success in these post-pandemic days is buttressed by an elite clique of uber-headliners who go on massive stadium tours or seemingly endless arena runs around the world and that does indeed put booking pressure on the multi-genre festivals. 

And if ticket buyers expect their favorites will be playing close by, why schlep to the California desert, the fecund fields of Tennessee or into the teeming mass at Golden Gate or Chicago’s Grant Park?

While the huge megafestivals perhaps have a bit of heartburn, other sectors of the festival space seem to be carving out a thriving space. 

The genre festival is nothing new, not really. Festivals built around country, metal and EDM have existed for a long time, because those artists didn’t necessarily fit into the oeuvre traditional festival bookers sought to create. Rolling Loud proved that hip-hop can drive festival business, as well. In the last few years, short-duration festivals built around drilled-down genre definitions have emerged.

There’s old-school punk festival No Values in Pomona, California; and, in Pasadena, danceable indie- and sweatcore-loving Just Like Heaven and gothy New-Wave post-punky Cruel World (see page 22), all by Goldenvoice, which also joins with 88rising to feature Asian and Asian American artists at Head In The Clouds in Queens, New York. Guns N’ Roses guitarist Slash has launched a blues festival (see page 25) and the late 90s and early aughts emo and pop-punk loving kids are buoying the nostalgia curated by Warped Tour’s Kevin Lyman, Hopeless Records’ Eric Tobin and KMGMT’s Mike Kaminsky with the inaugural Summer School (see page 24) and other similarly aimed fests.

There’s plenty more and new ones pop up all the time — Oceans Calling added a boot-scooting sibling called Country Calling to its run beside the beach in Maryland this autumn, which includes cover artist Lainey Wilson (see page 28). 

Artist-curated festivals, too, find success with a laser focus. J. Cole’s Dreamville has drawn 100,000 to Raleigh, North Carolina’s Dorothea Dix Park. Jack Harlow is hoping his imprimatur will bring similar success for his Gazebo in Louisville, Kentucky.

Genre and artist festivals shouldering their way to prominence makes sense given the broader cultural moment where consumers are increasingly able to fine-tune their consumption. Streaming services for both visual media and music may have eroded the monoculture but it results in hyperservice with marked specificity. And at festivals it’s a similar dynamic: why spend thousands to watch acts that don’t thrill you when you can spend a fraction (of both time and money) to see tightly curated lineups that serve your passion? Maybe that’s bad for discovery but it’s certainly good for the bottom line.

The mega-festival explosion may be cooling with only the strongest surviving (and, yes, that will include Coachella) but the targeted market seems to be the future.