Coachella is kicking off in just a few hours – but does anyone care? (Picture: Getty)
We are just hours away from the first weekend of Coachella 2024 kicking off, meaning our Instagram and TikTok feeds are about to be packed with sun-drenched pictures of the latest festival fashions and a sprinkling of grainy videos showing the performers.
This year, Lana Del Rey, Tyler, The Creator and Doja Cat will be headlining the annual bash from Indio, California, while Skepta, Sabrina Carpenter, Blur, Grimes and Renee Rapp make up the line-up.
Gwen Stefani will also be hitting the stage for a huge reunion with her No Doubt bandmates, belting out some of their biggest hits.
However, despite the festival being within touching distance, there is no denying that the hype has been almost non-existent compared to previous years.
There are currently very few headlines surrounding the first weekend, which eventually sold out in February after lackluster ticket sales – weeks after they first went on sale.
Tickets have routinely disappeared within hours for every festival, but are currently still up for grabs for next weekend, with the cheapest general admission passes going for $499, while the priciest VIP option costs $1,269.
If making the visit to California isn’t in the cards for you, six stages will be streamed live on YouTube, so you can watch the headliners from the comfort of your own home.
According to the LA Times, 2023 marked the first year in over a decade that both weekends didn’t sell out and 2024 sales have been the slowest in a decade.
This may come as a shock as Coachella has completely dominated the news cycle, and our social media feeds, in previous years, with some of the biggest names in music impressing the 125,000-strong crowd.
Who could forget that excitement reached fever pitch when Beyonce turned the festival stage into her very own concert, blessing us with Beychella in 2018?
Beyonce blessed us with the best Coachella performance in 2018 (Picture: Getty)
Harry Styles transformed the 2022 stage into his very own Harry’s House, while Ariana Grande, Childish Gambino, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Drake and Lady Gaga have also performed in previous years.
All eyes were on Indio Valley last year when Frank Ocean’s set was thrown into chaos after he suffered an ankle injury, causing him to pull out of the headline slot on the second weekend of the festival.
Blink-182 were drafted in to take his spot, closing out Coachella 2023 in style.
Unpacking the issue with this year’s festivities on social media, many suggested that the line-up might have something to do with it.
Harry Styles was among the headliners in 2022 (Picture: Getty)
Ariana Grande stole the show in 2019 (Picture: Getty)
Reddit user Horatiavelvetina said: ‘To be honest, it just does not seem like fun. And like a particularly exhausting festival that just rarely rarely makes it worth it.’
Celj1234 agreed: ‘Coachella has high expectations. The festival will still be great and a amazing time but for the general public they missed the mark with the lineup this year. W2 is already below facevalue.
‘I can’t recall another time in recent history the public was this down/mehh on a coachella lineup [sic].’
Creative-Coconut replied: ‘Coachella seems to have lost its special-ness as the years go by. It happens, it’s a normal thing but now, it just seems like any other festival getting worse and more common acts. Not a bad thing necessarily – just a thing.’
Fans were divided over the 2024 line-up (Picture: Getty)
As Future-Lover- slated: ‘I love music festivals but Coachella stopped being cool over 10 years ago at this point. I’d only ever go if I were being paid for some reason.’
Despite the dip in interest, Coachella bosses aren’t said to be worried – Dave Brookes, Billboard’s senior director of live music and touring telling the LA Time that this is a ‘natural off-cycle’.
‘I don’t buy that the Coachella brand is permanently diminished at all,’ he insisted.
‘Obviously this was an off-year, [but] it’s hands-down one of the best experiences out there.’
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