Coachella ticket sales have been slower than usual, but other festivals are also seeing dips

After months of public debate over slow ticket sales, the annual Coachella Valley Music and Arts festival opens Friday (April 12) near Palm Springs with an expected attendance of nearly 200,000 fans over two weekends, sources say Advertising signselling about 80% of the 250,000 tickets available for purchase this year.

How the shortfall will affect the festival's bottom line is unclear, but sources close to the festival say the drop in sales, down 14%-17% from last year, is not as bad as many had predicted. The first weekend of the festival has historically sold out in a matter of hours, but this year, it took nearly a month to sell out for the first weekend.

Coachella remains the most-attended and highest-grossing annual festival in North America, surpassing Austin City Limits — which also spans two weekends with 75,000 people per weekend — and the Electric Daisy Carnival at Las Vegas Speedway. which peaked at over 130,000 in 2022.

Coachella is also the largest media platform in the festival space, attracting massive viewership thanks to its partnership with YouTube and the hundreds of media credentials it grants to major news outlets that provide ongoing coverage. In January, Gwen Stefani's manager Irving Azoff he said Advertising sign that one of the reasons No Doubt decided to hold their 2024 reunion at Coachella was because of the worldwide attention the festival garnered.

But Coachella's size and scale doesn't make it immune to the challenges facing much of the festival industry. A series of popular festivals planned for the second quarter of 2024 — New Orleans JazzFest, which runs from April 25 to May 5, along with Los Angeles' Beach Life festival in early May and the famous Welcome festival to Rockville in Daytona Beach on May 9-12 — have not sold out, for example. Other popular events later in the year, such as Governors Ball in New York (June 7-9), Electric Forest (June 20-23) and Lollapalooza (August 1-4), used to sell out days after their release. , are a refuge nor exhausted.

There is little agreement on why sales have slowed. Ticket brokers used to buy thousands of tickets for a profit on sites like StubHub, but sales volume for events like Coachella or Lollapalooza have dropped significantly in recent years as markup has declined.

Booking agents from major agencies representing A-list talent have begun to argue that festivals need to create more lucrative financial incentives to attract better acts, while many independent agents attribute the decline to price hikes that have made tickets unaffordable. affordable.

Coachella ticket prices have increased by $50 from 2022, when three-day GA tickets cost $449, to $499 in 2024, an increase of about 11%. In 2019, before the pandemic, three-day GA tickets were priced at $429.

Booking agent JJ Cassiereco-founder of independent booking agency 33^rd and West, says festival fans are more sensitive to price increases than in the past, especially younger fans who are seeing their spending power eroded by inflation.

“I'm very concerned about fans finding themselves priced out of the market,” says Cassiere Advertising signnoting that even a $20 price increase might be an upside for some fans.

Other agents blame declining sales on headliner talent, arguing that the festival's 2024 headliner pool — which, for Coachella, includes Lana Del Rey, Tyler the Creator, Doja Cat and No Doubt — doesn't challenge the same enthusiasm as touring artists. Taylor Swift and Beyoncé did it in 2023.

The festival's lineup is a sign “that Coachella and pretty much every other festival booker had limited options when it came to talent,” says a booking agent who has worked with the festival for more than a decade and spoke on the condition of anonymity. the article. “The number of artists who want to tour festivals this year is very small.”

For much of the 2010s, festivals were able to pay headliners up to 50% more than artists headlining their own arena tours would – after all, festivals often charge more for tickets, attract more more crowds and covered much of an artist's output court costs. That started to change in 2016 and 2017, the agent explains Jared Arfa with IAG, as ticketing companies such as Ticketmaster and AEG AXS began to focus on the amount of money scalpers were making by selling tickets at inflated prices. To help close the gap and capture that income for artists, Arfa says, Ticketmaster and others have begun using programs like dynamic pricing and platinum to strategically raise the price of higher-demand tickets — like seats in the first row – and significantly increase the number of artists did in their own concerts.

The result was a huge increase in price, with the top 10 tours in 2023 earning an average of $5.7 million per show compared to 2017, when the top 10 tours averaged $3.6 million per show — a 58% increase in just six years.

“The thing about every festival now is that dynamic pricing is so good and prevalent that any artist big enough to headline a festival has more incentive to just headline their own shows,” says one agent. Advertising sign, noting that a headlining slot at Coachella in 2024 is less of a financial decision and more for artists “who are on their way and need to make a statement.”

“Going forward,” the agent continues, “festivals must adapt to meet this changing reality, either by paying headliners more or keeping stronger undercards — but that's not easy.

While titles are important, Peter Shapiro with the Brooklyn Bowl and Day Glo Ventures says that spending more on talent isn't always a viable long-term solution, and notes that the best investments festival producers can make are in the festival community and their overall experience.

“People attend festivals because they enjoy an outdoor experience with other fans in a comfortable environment,” says Shapiro. “That won't change, and the more organizers can invest in improving that experience, the more it will pay off in the years to come.”