Heineken is one of the sponsors with an area inside the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival at the Empire Polo Club in Indio.
This article was originally published on the front page of The Press-Enterprise on Thursday, April 11, 2013.
BY VANESSA FRANKO
STAFF WRITER
This weekend, the Empire Polo Club in Indio and its surrounding environs transform into an acres-wide fashion runway, a pitch meeting for marketing brands, a get-seen site for celebrities and the center of the pop culture universe thanks to the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival.
And, oh yeah, there’s music.
Nearly 100,000 fans will watch more than 190 featured performers across six stages from Friday through Sunday — and then repeat the process with a new crop of attendees April 19-21.
“In the beginning we didn’t care about feather headdresses or neon clothes,” said Aracely Jarrell, a Beaumont resident who has attended every Coachella and will be going both weekends this year. “You were only there for the music.”
Not any more.
The Zeitgeist of Coachella has spread far beyond its original form of the one-day alternative music concert that festival promoter Goldenvoice put on in the fall of 1999. The show has helped brand clothing, served as the punchline on network sitcoms and become a familiar entry in America’s entertainment vernacular.
Some examples:
KTLA’s morning show offers fashion trends for festival style.
Popular viral videos – including the “naked wizard taser brawl” and “wasted guy trips over flip-flops” make it to cable television and rack up scores of Web hits. They become so popular that comic Daniel Tosh incorporates them into his “Tosh.0” show on Comedy Central.
NBC comedy ”Community” jokes about losing short-term memory at Coachella.
Even troubled actress Lindsay Lohan demanded that her court-ordered rehab stint begin after Coachella.
This is not a rag-tag gathering of body-painted hipsters. The Goldenvoice festivals hauled in $254.4 million to the desert area according to an economic impact analysis presented at the Coachella Valley Economic Partnership’s summit in October 2012.
Posh parties pitching high-end brands can be found all over the Coachella Valley – if you’re invited. Belvedere Vodka, backpack manufacturer JanSport and athleticwear giant Adidas throw exclusive soirees at resorts and ranches with celebrities, pool play and free swag. Clothier Armani A/X and mobile carrier T-Mobile attracted thousands to an airport hangar in Thermal for the Neon Carnival party in 2012.
“Seven years ago you wouldn’t be working the email chain trying to RSVP to everything,” said Dave Brooks, managing editor of concert industry publication Venues Today. “It was more about hanging out at the hotel pool and hanging out with friends.”
The demographics of the festival – brand-aware vacationers spending $500-$700 of discretionary income — are attractive to manufacturers eager to stamp their logo on the marketplace.
“If you look at the festivals of the ’60s and ’70s, like Monterey Pop, those were not commercial events. …The more we’re comfortable mixing artistry and commerce together, the more prevalent it gets at festivals,” Brooks said.
The event, once a nightmarish dead zone for its cellphone-reliant attendees, is now well-covered by cell towers. That connectivity has grown Coachella beyond the desert, said Derek Burrill, an associate professor at UC Riverside in the department of media and cultural studies.
“It’s a heavily wired event,” he said.
And that’s an absolute necessity for the communication ecology that erupts each year:
Scores of “look at me, I’m at Coachella” posts will blanket Facebook, Twitter and other social-media sites. More than 100,000 images tagged with #coachella were uploaded by photo-sharing site Instagram between April 13 and 22 last year, festival officials said.
More 1.9 million people watched the festival’s webcast on YouTube in 2012 and viewed more than 1.5 million hours of live Coachella performances.
Virtual environments parallel the event itself, with fans communicating real-time from amid the throngs, posting conversations, photos and links on such places as the festival’s own chat room and sponsors’ websites.
MUSIC…BY THE WAY
Despite all the distractions, music is still the core of Coachella. It’s the staging area for reunions, such as opening-night co-headliners Blur and the Stone Roses as well as a proving ground for emerging acts.
“Muse … announced themselves as a stadium band,” Burrill said about the band’s 2010 headlining debut.
Choosing headliners with more mainstream clout grew the audience, Jarrell said, citing Coldplay’s performance in 2005.
A year later, the Queen of Pop was playing an overflowing set in the dance-heavy Sahara Tent. “I think Madonna ruined Coachella,” Jarrell said.
Madonna’s performance – and her profanity-laced rant on then-president George W. Bush — made headlines in not only music publications, but mainstream news websites, daily newspapers and People Magazine.
Spreads for festival season are now an annual must in the fashion media.
“It’s become a real fashion moment,” said Nola Weinstein, executive editorial director of Glam Media, a company that runs several thousand lifestyle websites and blogs. “It’s a chicer version of Woodstock.”
Celebrities such as Anne Hathaway, Kristin Stewart, and pop star Rihanna show up in blogs and magazines, showing off their latest outfits or just getting seen.
Jarrell said the celebrity attendees have bolstered Coachella’s pop-culture allure, creating an air of “I want to be part of it, I want to be part of the in-crowd.”
Follow Vanessa Franko on Twitter at @vanessafranko and on the Audio File blog at http://blog.pe.com/audio-file
COACHELLA VALLEY MUSIC AND ARTS FESTIVAL
WHEN: April 12-14; April 19-21
WHERE: Empire Polo Club, 81-800 Ave. 51, Indio
ADMISSION: General admission passes are sold out, but high-end camping and passes are still available
ON THE WEB: www.coachella.com