The Present & Future of Festivals In 2025

The first weekend of Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival 2025 sold out sometime in late February. There was no grand announcement that tickets were all gone, as has been the case in years past.

Of course, in many of those years, the tickets sold out on on-sale, weeks before the line-up was even announced. In 2024, Weekend One didn’t sell out until mid-February and this year, it seems, it took even longer. Weekend Two, for what it’s worth, still had tickets available as of press time.

It’s not just Coachella. There’s still tickets available for Bonnaroo, including the one-day ticket promoter Live Nation introduced last year. It’s certainly not because the lineups are underwhelming. Complaining that Coachella’s headliners are disappointing is as tired (and inaccurate) a trope as arguing that “Saturday Night Live” is worse than ever. But even the most jaded cynics had little to grumble about this year with Lady Gaga, Green Day and festival favorite Post Malone topping the weekends at Indio, California’s Empire Polo Club.

Similarly, Bonnaroo has Luke Combs, Tyler, the Creator, Olivia Rodrigo and Hozier on the top line.

If those headliners at the segment-defining events can’t draw a sellout, what hope do second- and third-tier festivals have?

It’s not all heartburn, of course. Coachella’s country cousin Stagecoach, also produced by AEG Presents’ subsidiary Goldenvoice, is sold out. In 2024, according to city tax records, the one weekend of Stagecoach sold 89,003 tickets. That’s more than either weekend of Coachella, which brought in 81,960 and 80,148. Power players in the festival space frequently gush about the festival and its guiding light, Goldenvoice Executive Vice President Stacy Vee.

“What makes great events and makes things special is when someone is trying to put their personality out there. Look at Stagecoach: a major festival, huge, bigger than ever, but Stacy Vee has such a specific vision,” Goldenvoice vice president Danny Bell says. “It’s such a specific idea, and she takes risks on bookings and she creates this magical weekend. And like that festival, when she’s really been able to hone it and explore, her vision has grown so much just because of it.”

But there are still material matters: festivals are expensive to put on and expensive to attend. Ticket prices are high — a Coachella weekend GA ticket is $600; Bonnaroo comes in at $455 — and the cost of travel and all that comes with it can be a hard lift for the target demographic, which tends to be younger. Those pressures have taken a toll on longstanding festivals in the U.K. and Australia, where smaller festivals in particular are taking years off or shuttering altogether.

Shawn Gee, President of Live Nation Urban, which produces Roots Picnic in Philadelphia, Broccoli City in Washington, D.C. and OneMusic in Atlanta, says providing value is more important than ever.

“Overall, as a festival producer, I’m truly focusing on my business model. I cannot let costs whether it’s supplier cost, production cost or talent cost, get out of hand,” he says. “I have to manage my ticketing, my prices and overdeliver the experience to the fan.”

At 30,000 feet, it seems like the festival industry thrives when a fest stops trying to be everything to everyone. There’s been a lot of success for niche genre-specific festivals and artist-curated fests. Millennials nostalgic for their black eyeliner emo kid days pack it in at Las Vegas’ When We Were Young (which expanded to two days for 2025). Goldenvoice’s stable of genre fests at Pasadena, California’s Brookside at the Rose Bowl — for example, the sweatcore indie of Just Like Heaven, the gothy Cruel World and Asia-focused Head In The Clouds — are critical and commercial success stories.

But Bell, who books San Francisco’s dance-heavy Portola, says the secret isn’t just cornering a genre necessarily.

“Festivals need to have a point of view and be telling a story of some sort,” he says. “I really try to make this about the scene and the history of dance music and rave culture. And San Francisco is a large piece of it. My point of view is the best new and the best old. There’s a musical line of what I feel like works and what doesn’t.”

And that, he says, is intuition and instinct. More art than science.

Gee has a similar mindset. He recognizes the demographics his festivals draw and leans into it.
“Broccoli City is really Millennial and Gen Z primarily. It’s Black culture, but it’s young. Every year when I’m at Broccoli City, I’m the oldest one by far, whereas Roots Picnic is a little older, with more of a Millennial and Gen X focus, but it’s a wide range of music,” he says. “We have Lenny Kravitz, Meek Mill and D’Angelo on our top line. That’ll never happen anywhere else, but we understand who our audience is.”

If you want to call that a Stagecoach-style approach to booking, you wouldn’t be wrong. Festivals that have what Bell called “a point of view” — be that honing hard to a specific genre or demographic or, oftentimes, just a vibe — are punching above their weight and thriving and don’t face the same handwringing that comes when Coachella and Bonnaroo are a little slow.
Now, of course, some of that handwringing is concern trolling and overwrought. A festival that gets to 80,000 attendees, even if it takes longer than usual, is not really in trouble. It’s a point AEG’s President, Global Touring Rich Schaefer made at Pollstar Live in 2024.

“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.

But as the polling ahead of the 2024 Presidential election showed, when it comes to economics, sometimes vibes are more important than reality. And if people feel like something is foundering, they can take actions (like not buying tickets) that create the reality they perceived.

And, now, with worry the driving force in the broader U.S. economy, with concern about tariffs, stagnant jobs numbers and a declining stock market leading consumers to cut back on discretionary spending, the live market generally and the festival market in particular has to navigate a consumer class leary of shelling out hundreds or thousands of dollars for an event beyond the horizon of uncertainty.

At the same time, festivals are expensive. Both talent and production costs are climbing, in part because of the overheated post-pandemic live market and because, well, the costs of everything are higher.

FestForums’ Laurie Kirby says it may be time for promoters to start having hard conversations about the solution to higher costs and it may be very uncomfortable.

“There is a sense — and agents won’t like hearing this — but that talent is not part of that solution. They think because we came out of a post-pandemic world and there was such a pent-up demand that those high fees they were getting were going to be sustainable,” she says.

Bell says if a festival books a “super hot” act, there “isn’t a price fans aren’t willing to pay,” but that’s lightning in a bottle. Otherwise, it’s imperative promoters nail the pricing and payouts.
“The economics are the economics. It’s more expensive to produce events than ever, but it’s also more expensive for artists to tour than ever. And fans aren’t willing to pay more for tickets.

So we’re in this tough catch-22, but what we’re seeing is when a band is on fire and super hot, there isn’t a price fans aren’t willing to pay.” he says. “But the flip side is then they’re spending more money on one concert and not going to as many concerts. You just gotta really deliver. Like that’s the thing with Portola: it’s not a cheap ticket, it’s only two days, but I hypercurate every slot and I want people to feel like they’re getting their money’s worth and it’s worked out so far. So if we could keep that going, I’d love to charge less. It’s really hard to, though, because of how expensive things are.”