Art
In addition to hosting live music, Coachella is a showcase for visual arts, including installation art and sculpture. Many of the pieces are interactive, providing a visual treat for attendees. Throughout the years, the art has grown in scale and outrageousness. Paul Clemente, Coachella's art director since 2009, said, "I think the level of detail and finish and artistry and scale and complexity and technology, everything is constantly getting notched up, ratcheted up. We're obviously constantly trying to, for lack of a better word, (to) outdo ourselves and make it better for the fans." In Coachella's early years, art was mostly recycled from the previous year's Burning Man festival, due to smaller budgets. Between 2010 and 2015, Goldenvoice shifted its focus from renting pieces to commissioning them specifically for the festival, increasing their budget. Artists are given access to the grounds just 10 days before the festival, giving them a tight timeframe in which to assemble their pieces.[67] Due to the high cost of re-assembly, only about half of them appear again outside of Coachella.[66] Describing the festival's importance to art, Cynthia Washburn of art collective Poetic Kinetics said, "With all the exposure here, I think Coachella is becoming as attractive for artists as it is for the musicians." In 2013, Clemente considered about 300 art proposals, the most in the festival's history for the time.[69] Poetic Kinetics has designed several giant moving art installations for past Coachella festivals, including a snail in 2013, an astronaut in 2014, and a caterpillar that "metamorphosized" into a butterfly in 2015. Some of the works have been featured at Art Basel, and involved participants from architecture schools, both local and international. A few of the visual artists, such as Hotshot the Robot, Robochrist Industries, the Tesla Coil (Cauac), Cyclecide, and The Do LaB, alongside avant-garde performance troupe Lucent Dossier Experience, have appeared for several consecutive years. Poster artist Emek has produced limited edition posters every year since 2007.
Location
Coachella takes place in Indio, California, located in the Inland Empire's Coachella Valley within the Colorado Desert. Temperatures during the festival's history have ranged from 106 °F (41 °C) on April 21, 2012, to 43 °F (6 °C) on April 14, 2012. The festival is hosted at the 78-acre Empire Polo Club; when accounting for land used for parking and camping, the event covers a footprint of over 600 acres. The site is about 125 miles east of Los Angeles.
Organization
As the host city to Coachella and the Stagecoach Festival, Indio provides several services such as police and fire protection, private security, medical services, outside law enforcement, and city staff services. These services for the three weekends of festivals totaled $2.77 million in 2012. All public safety needs are coordinated by Indio's police department, requiring them to liaison with nearly 12 agencies, including police departments from nearby cities, the sheriff's department, California Highway Patrol, the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, American Medical Response, and the California Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control. To avoid disturbing local residents, a curfew for music performances is enforced; since 2010, it has been 1 AM on Fridays and Saturdays, an hour later than the previous curfew, and midnight on Sundays. Goldenvoice must pay a fine of $1,000 for each minute the festival exceeds the curfew.
- Environmental Sustainability
- Camping
Organizers of Coachella manage its carbon footprint by partnering with the organization Global Inheritance to promote several environmentally friendly initiatives. Global Inheritance's original project was its "TRASHed :: Art of Recycling" campaign, which challenges local artists to design and decorate recycling bins that are placed across the festival grounds. Another program is "Carpoolchella"; launched in 2007, it rewards festivalgoers who carpool in groups of four or more and display the word "Carpoolchella" on their cars by entering them in a drawing to win VIP tickets for life. Through the 2014 festival, the program had 140,000 participants and more than 70 winners of lifetime festival passes. In 2007, Coachella teamed up with Global Inheritance to start a 10-for-1 recycling program, in which anyone who collects ten empty water bottles receives a free full one. In 2009, the festival introduced $10 refillable water bottles, which purchasers could refill at water stations inside the festival and within the campgrounds.[citation needed] Other programs used at the festival include solar powered DJ booths and seesaws used to charge mobile phones. About 600 staffers are required to collect the litter that accumulates during the festival. Resources are sorted individually on site before being taken to local landfills and recycling centers. Goldenvoice maintains a goal to "divert 90 percent of [its] recyclable and compostable materials". In 2013, staff diverted over 577,720,000 pounds of materials, comprising: 36,860 tons of aluminum cans, 105,000 tons of cardboard, 65,360 tons of PET plastic, 47,040 tons of scrap metal, and 34,600 tons of glass.
In 2003, Coachella began allowing tent camping as an option for festival lodging. The campground site is on a polo field adjacent to the venue grounds and has its own entrance on the south side of the venue. 2010 introduced many new features, such as re-entry from the campsite to the festival grounds, parking next to your tent, and recreational vehicle camping spots (recreational vehicle camping was offered one year only). For that festival, there were more than 17,000 campers. At the 2012 event, on-site facilities included recycling, a general store, showers, mobile phone charging stations and an internet cafe with free WiFi.
Booking
Tollett begins to book artists for each festival as early as the previous August. In addition to agent pitches and artists discovered online, the lineup is culled from acts booked by Goldenvoice for their other 1,800 shows each year. Tollett uses the promoter's ticketing figures for insight into who to book, saying: "There are AEG shows all across the country, and I see all their show lists and ticket counts. So I see little things that are happening maybe before some others, because they don't have that data." According to the Los Angeles Times, booking fees for most artists playing the festival allegedly start at $15,000 and extend into the "high six figures"; top-billed artists for 2010 were expected to be paid over $1 million. Billboard's sources estimate that non-headline acts can earn anywhere from $500 to $100,000. In booking the festival, Goldenvoice uses radius clauses that can prevent acts from performing in Los Angeles, the Inland Empire, or San Diego for up to three months before and after the festival. The promoter has allowed some of Coachella's acts to make appearances in the region prior to the festival and between weekends, but only at events and venues owned or controlled by Goldenvoice's parent company AEG; one such example was Jay-Z's concert at Staples Center in 2010. Goldenvoice now promotes these events, dubbed "Localchella", as a series of small warm-up shows for Coachella in Southern California.
Promotion and Commercial Partnerships
Organizers were initially resistant to accepting sponsorship deals that would help Coachella turn a higher profit. In 2003, Tollett estimated that Goldenvoice could earn an additional $300,000 to $500,000 by adding a corporate sponsor to the festival name, but he did not want to violate the purity of the event. He said, "I hate it when you go to shows and you are bombarded with all this advertising. It just shows a lack of respect for your audience and the music." Organizers have relaxed their opposition over the years; recently, brewing company Heineken has sponsored a small indoor venue at the festival called the "Heineken House". Clothing retailer H&M also sponsored a small tent on the festival grounds in 2015 where attendees could purchase items from the company's clothing line inspired by the festival called "H&M Loves Coachella". Since 2011, YouTube has live streamed the opening weekend of Coachella. Viewers can choose from three channels of performances to watch. In 2014, AXS TV began broadcasting the second weekend on television; over 20 hours of live performances from the 2015 festival were broadcast on AXS TV. Performances from the 2015 festival were also broadcast live on Sirius XM satellite radio for the first time. For 2016, organizers partnered with Vantage.tv to offer virtual reality (VR) content for the festival. Ticket holders received a cardboard VR viewer inspired by Google Cardboard in their Coachella welcome package that can used with the Coachella VR mobile app (available on Android, iOS, and Samsung Gear VR). Content includes 360-degree panoramic photos of previous events, virtual tours of the 2016 festival site, interviews, and performances. That same year, YouTube live streamed performances from weekend two in 360 degrees for viewing with VR headsets. The success of Coachella has led its organizers to partner with other American music festivals. In 2003, Goldenvoice agreed to work with the organizers of Field Day, a New York-based festival modeled after Coachella, to help promote and produce the event, although the show was completely overhauled from its original vision. In September 2014, Goldenvoice announced it had entered into a joint venture with Red Frog Events to help them promote and produce their Firefly Music Festival. In January 2015, a similar agreement was reached with the organizers of the Hangout Music Festival. In a lawsuit against a similarly named festival Hoodchella, Goldenvoice claimed it spent $700,000 in 2015 on "media and related content to promote Coachella".
Impact and Legacy
The success of Coachella in its early years proved that American music festivals could work and succeed in a destination form, as opposed to a traveling festival. In the years following Coachella's success, many other festivals have followed in its footsteps, copying its format as a destination festival with multiple stages, attractions, art, and camping.[citation needed] Some of these new festivals have grown to achieve the same success as Coachella, such as Lollapalooza in Chicago, Governors Ball in New York City and Bonnaroo in Tennessee. According to a 2015 ranking by online ticket retailer viagogo, Coachella was the second-most in-demand concert ticket, trailing only the Tomorrowland festival. Coachella is considered a trendsetter in music and fashion. Singer Katy Perry said, "The lineup always introduces the best of the year for the rest of the year." According to a 2012 economic impact study, Coachella brought $254.4 million to the desert region that year; of that total, Indio received $89.2 million in consumer spending and $1.4 million in tax revenue. Goldenvoice's other festival at the Empire Polo Club, Stagecoach, has been called a "cousin" of Coachella, but it has grown at a faster pace, eventually selling out for the first time in 2012 with 55,000 attendees. Together, the two festivals are estimated by experts to have a global impact of $704.75 million in 2016; approximately $403.2 million of that will impact the Coachella Valley, $106 million of which will go to businesses in Indio. The city is expected to gain $3.18 million in ticket taxes from the two festivals in 2016.