What Is Coachella?

Where Coachella is.

Where is Coachella? At the Empire Polo Club, 81-800 Avenue 51 in Indio, California, in the Coachella Valley of Riverside County, within the Colorado Desert. The Coachella location is about 125 miles east of Los Angeles and around half an hour's drive from Palm Springs, and the festival takes its name from the valley.

The polo club covers about 1,000 acres and has twelve polo fields. The festival itself uses 78 acres of it, and with parking and camping the event covers some 642 acres. The Haagen family owns the Empire Polo Club. Goldenvoice has used the grounds since its 1993 Pearl Jam concert, bought 280 acres around the club in 2013, including the neighbouring Eldorado Polo Club, and signed a long-term lease in 2021 that gave it year-round operational control. Current City of Indio material describes that private arrangement as running through 2050. The polo fields closed that November.

Where does Coachella take place when it is not Coachella? The same field hosts Stagecoach, Goldenvoice's country music festival, on the weekend after, and has held one-off festivals such as Desert Trip in 2016. So where is Coachella held for its two April weekends is also Goldenvoice's home field for its other festivals.

When Coachella is, and how long it lasts.

When is Coachella? In April, over two consecutive weekends. How long is Coachella? Three days each weekend, Friday to Sunday, so how many days is Coachella comes out as six festival days over nine calendar days. The organiser plans the same line-up for both weekends except at Quasar, but line-ups and set times are subject to change. The two-weekend format began in 2012, when Goldenvoice chose a second, separately ticketed weekend over squeezing more people into the first; before that it was one weekend, of one, two and, from 2007, three days.

The first Coachella, in 1999, was held in October, and the move to spring in 2001 was made to beat the desert heat. Music stops at 1 a.m. on Fridays and Saturdays and at midnight on Sundays. Under a 2013 agreement with Indio, Goldenvoice pays $20,000 if a set overruns the curfew by five minutes and $1,000 for every minute after that.

How big Coachella is.

How many people attend Coachella? Current City of Indio material lists capacity at 125,000 people a day and attendance at 250,000 across the two weekends. The two figures use different time frames; the city document does not explain its counting method.

The money grew faster than the crowd. The 2017 edition grossed $114.6 million, the first time a recurring festival passed $100 million, and a 2012 study put Coachella's spending in the desert region at $254.4 million for that year.

The audience at home is larger again. Coachella streams on YouTube, and in 2018 the festival counted 41 million viewers in all, with 458,000 people watching Beyoncé's set at the same time.

A short history, and who owns Coachella.

The site came first. On 5 November 1993 Pearl Jam, then boycotting venues tied to Ticketmaster, played to almost 25,000 people at the Empire Polo Club. Goldenvoice's Paul Tollett booked that show, and he later said it sowed the seeds of a festival there. By 1997 Goldenvoice was losing acts to richer promoters, and Tollett began pitching a multi-stage festival of artists who were respected rather than necessarily in the charts, handing out pamphlets of the sunny polo club at a muddy Glastonbury.

When did Coachella start? On 9 and 10 October 1999, with Beck, Tool and Rage Against the Machine at the top of the bill and the Chemical Brothers and Underworld on it. About 17,000 tickets were sold for the first day and 20,000 for the second, well short of the 70,000 the promoters hoped for, and Goldenvoice lost $850,000. There was no Coachella in 2000.

It came back as a single day in April 2001, headlined by Jane's Addiction. That March, Tollett sold Goldenvoice to AEG, Philip Anschutz's Anschutz Entertainment Group, for $7 million. Camping arrived in 2003. Rick Van Santen died that December, aged 41. The 2004 edition, with Radiohead and the Cure, was Coachella's first sellout, with 110,000 people over two days; Tollett credits Radiohead with changing how artists saw it.

The festival became three days in 2007 and two weekends in 2012. A 2013 agreement with the City of Indio covered the festivals through 2030. That municipal agreement is separate from Goldenvoice's later private lease with the Haagen family, which gave the promoter year-round operational control of the Empire Polo Club; current city material describes the venue arrangement as running through 2050. The pandemic cancelled 2020 and 2021, and Coachella returned in April 2022.

Who owns Coachella? Goldenvoice produces and promotes the festival and is owned by AEG Presents. Paul Tollett remains Goldenvoice's president and chief executive. That is separate from the land: the Haagen family owns the Empire Polo Club, while Goldenvoice operates it under a long-term lease. The ownership has been a controversy of its own: in 2017 reports that Anschutz had given money to anti-LGBTQ and climate-denial causes led to calls for a boycott, which Anschutz called fake news, saying he would stop funding any such group he learned of.

The Coachella stages.

The Coachella stages have kept their names since the early years. The Coachella Stage is the main outdoor stage, where the headliners play. Beside it is the Outdoor Theatre, a smaller open-air stage. The tents are named after deserts: Mojave and Gobi, two mid-size tents with acts from every genre, and the Sahara, a hangar-sized tent for the top electronic acts. Sahara was enlarged to 80 feet high in 2013, rebuilt a quarter bigger near the entrance in 2018, then moved again in 2024 into a new steel structure nearly 100 feet tall and 40 feet wider than its predecessor.

Smaller rooms have come and gone around them. Yuma, a small indoor tent opened in 2013, is for emerging and underground DJs. Sonora, from 2017, hosts punk and Latin acts. Despacio, co-created by James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem, played disco and club records on vinyl in 2016.

Why Coachella is famous.

The first reason is the poster. Its billing order is argued over by agents because the size of each name can affect future fees. Coachella's contracts are also known for a radius clause. Current industry reporting describes restrictions on competing appearances in and around Southern California between mid-December and early May, while stressing that the dates, distance and exceptions vary by artist, year and contract.

The second is the moments. Daft Punk's 2006 show on a pyramid-shaped stage is cited as one of the most memorable in the festival's history. In 2012 a projection of Tupac Shakur performed with Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg. In 2018 Beyoncé became the first Black woman to headline, with a show built around the marching bands of historically Black colleges that critics called historic.

The third is the record. Coachella won Billboard's Top Festival award four years running to 2014, and Pollstar's festival of the year ten times in eleven years to 2015. It has also drawn criticism for more than its owner: the headdresses worn by some attendees as cultural appropriation, and, in 2018, reports of widespread sexual harassment, after which the festival introduced its Every One programme.

The music

What the music actually is.

Coachella is not a dance festival, but it has always had one inside it. The Chemical Brothers and Underworld were on the first bill in 1999, Daft Punk's pyramid is its most remembered show, and electronic acts have reached the top of the main-stage bill: Calvin Harris in 2016 and Swedish House Mafia in 2022. Anyma was billed as a special additional headliner in 2026. Wind cancelled his first-weekend set, but he performed on the second weekend. In 2023 the festival closed with Skrillex, Four Tet and Fred Again, added the day before its second weekend.

The rest of the bill ranges widely. Rock headliners built it, from Radiohead and the Cure to Rage Against the Machine; hip-hop and pop took over the top lines, from Jay-Z and Kendrick Lamar to Lady Gaga, Ariana Grande and Sabrina Carpenter. Bad Bunny and Blackpink were its first Latin and Asian headliners in 2023, and Karol G the first Latina headliner in 2026.

The Sahara shows how far that spread goes. Diljit Dosanjh played the tent on the first Saturday of 2023, and the festival's clip of "G.O.A.T." from that set has about 10 million views on its YouTube channel.

Hearing Coachella from home.

Coachella streams live on YouTube, several stages at once, and its channel keeps clips from each year. The most watched Coachella video there is FISHER playing "Losing It" on Friday 12 April 2019, with about 77 million views. Sets tend to go up on the artists' own channels. Fatboy Slim's set from 2026, nearly two hours, shot by the festival, has about 1.1 million views on his.

Coachella shares the American desert with EDC Las Vegas, and our guides cover both, as well as Tomorrowland, Ultra and Burning Man. And the Selector plays a DJ set at random from 67,005, if you would rather not choose.