Putting on a festival in a desert was never going to be easy. And yet somehow Coachella happens and this year, 125,000 average visitors per day braved life, limb and financial ruin in order to be part of the in-crowd.
And while there are some moments of greatness – huge thanks to Lady Gaga, Post Malone and Charli XCX for pulling it out of Coachella 2025’s dusty bag – for the most part it’s only ever bad news – from terrible performances, inadequate sound systems and tech, to horrific price gouging on a captive audience – that makes it into the outside world.
And frequently, while it’s attendees that pile on the complaints, broadcasting their dismay across social media, they may have only themselves to blame.
Too big to fail?
While Coachella is just one of the biggest festivals in the world (in terms of sheer size the UK’s Glastonbury Festival across 900 acres of lush farmland, easily knocks Coachella’s 642 acres of scorched desert into a cocked hat) it’s easily the most profitable with general admission tickets costing $649 for the first weekend and $599 for the second.
And, of course, once captive in a compound usually completely unable to sustain human life, the cost of staying alive – from food to accommodation to washroom facilities – easily adds thousands to that total, with luxury packages offering access to ‘VIP areas’ for those not wishing to muck in, costing ten times as much.
The net result of all this ‘fun’ is that Coachella has slipped from free-wheeling, ‘let's do the show right here’ hippy-styled, anti-authority, anything-goes, love-in, to an over-priced, overworked, cash generation machine.
Catalogue of errors
Thus, this year Coachella has played host to the usual dissatisfaction and disasters.
"Yesterday, when I pulled up, the artist before warned me that the sound had been chipping out to dead silence for sometimes minutes at a time," wrote DJ and producer BAMBII who appeared on Coachella's Do LaB stage.
"The equipment I played on was also completely malfunctioning. It's safe to assume had we been bigger artists on the main stage, this issue would've been fixed way earlier within the show day.
"Like so many other artists on that bill, it took a lot of hard work to even get to the position to be booked. Music is my entire life and I believe at a bare minimum the least a festival as reputable as Coachella could provide artists they're not paying, is a working sound system."
It’s just a continuation of Coachella’s rep for bad sound. Lana Del Rey’s headliner last year had fans complaining about sound quality, giving rise to a worried and lacklustre performance. Likewise Grimes' DJ set got spewed out at double speed due to a programming incompatibility.
In previous years we’ve seen Ariana Grande suffer audio issues during a surprise guest appearance with Nicki Minaj, Billie Eilish bring out Vince Staples, only for his mic to remain resolutely off, and – most famously – sticklers-for-quality Radiohead were forced to leave the stage not once, but twice due to technical problems.
And of course, our favourite of the lot, when Frank Ocean was scheduled to perform his long-awaited comeback gig at Coachella complete with an artificial ice rink and a squad of skaters only to have to pull the lot at the last minute due to… absolutely nothing working properly.
Frank, mate. It IS the middle of a desert after all…
But that’s perhaps not really the root of Coachella’s problems.
It’s not them. It’s you
In addition to being expected to achieve the impossible audio-wise (multiple artists performing with countless bits of gear in a freakin’ desert) there’s the small matter of Coachella’s audience…
Arguably, with costs skyrocketing, Coachella’s appeal increasingly only hits home with over-privileged, cash-laden, rights-of-passage-seeking elites with little interest in music.
Coachella is now the festival to be seen at, rather than a festival with anything actually worth seeing…
And given the current crowd’s always-on connectivity and expectation for quality and flawless presentation at all times, it seems that the vagaries and anything-can-happen nature of the live scenario entirely fails to deliver for them.
Hence the barrage of online moans.
Likewise, their willingness to deliver any kind of interaction or excitement to help the performer along has evaporated alongside their tollerence.
After all, they’re going to 'do the gig' whether you applaud or not. So why bother?
Never (ever) again
The results range from disinterested audiences (see last year’s Blur’s interaction, where, in the face of audience indifference to a singalong of the Boys and Girls megahit they didn’t even know, Damon Albarn promised that they would never see him again) to a failure to recognise greatness even when it’s just risen out of the stage right in front of them.
Yes, this year’s worst audience was at Benson Boone’s gig where he only magicked up the actual real Brian May to do a solo during his (ill-advised?) cover version of Bohemian Rhapsody, only to have the audience fully unable – despite his on-mic protestations and explanations – to understand just how brilliant May and everything they were looking at and hearing actually was.
Witness Boone’s post-gig TikTok reenactment of his frustration here:
@bensonboone Mystical Magical.
♬ Bohemian Rhapsody - Remastered 2011 - Queen
What’s the answer? Drop some prices and get more music fans in there? Pay more to the tech staff behind the scenes? Or – controversial – stop trying to do a festival in the desert at all.
Either way, Coachella remains the one we all love to hate. We can’t wait to see what it chews up and spits out next year.
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