Coachella takes place on the Empire Polo Club in Indio, California, in the Colorado Desert, over two identical weekends every April. It's one of the biggest and most profitable music festivals in the world. It started as a gamble by a small promoter, and its first edition lost a fortune. Here's how it got from there to here, and every headliner along the way.
A Pearl Jam gig in a polo field
The story starts in 1993. Pearl Jam were in a dispute with Ticketmaster over service charges and refused to play Los Angeles, so on 5 November they played the Empire Polo Club instead, to almost 25,000 fans. The promoter who booked it was Goldenvoice, run by Paul Tollett and Rick Van Santen, and the show proved the site could handle a big crowd.
A few years later Goldenvoice was losing bands to bigger promoters who could pay more, and Tollett decided a festival might be the answer: book lots of acts that weren't necessarily chart stars, and together they'd draw a crowd. At Glastonbury in 1997 he handed out leaflets with pictures of the sunny polo fields to artists and managers, and he has said people laughed, given the mud around them.
1999: the first one
The first Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival was held on 9 and 10 October 1999, three months after Woodstock '99 had ended in fires and violence. Beck, Tool and Rage Against the Machine headlined, with more than 80 acts in all. Tickets were $50 a day, and about 37,000 were sold over the two days, well short of the 70,000 Goldenvoice wanted. The crowd behaved, despite temperatures above 100°F, and the reviews were good: Pollstar named it festival of the year, and the Los Angeles Times critic Robert Hilburn said it had laid the foundation for a legacy of its own. Goldenvoice still lost $850,000, and the headliners agreed to be paid later.
There was no festival in 2000. It came back in April 2001 as a single day headlined by Jane's Addiction, the same year Goldenvoice was sold to AEG. It went to two days in 2002, started offering camping in 2003, and sold out for the first time in 2004, when Radiohead and The Cure headlined and 110,000 people came. Tollett has called 2004 the turning point.
Those early years were small by today's standards. The 2001 one-dayer drew 32,000 people and still lost money. In 2002, with Björk and Oasis on top, more than 55,000 came over two days, Queens of the Stone Age from nearby Palm Desert became the first local band to play, and the festival nearly broke even for the first time. In 2003 the city council approved camping on 2,252 plots, and 60,000 people came, the biggest crowd so far.
Bigger every year
In 2006 Daft Punk played under their pyramid, a set still cited as one of the most memorable in Coachella's history. The festival became three days in 2007. In 2012 it did something no one was sure would work: two separate weekends with the same line-up. Rolling Stone called it a very risky move. Tickets sold out in under three hours. The 2010 festival sold only three-day tickets for the first time, drew an estimated 225,000 people across the weekend, and lost several European acts when the eruption of Iceland's Eyjafjallajökull volcano shut down flights. In 2013 Goldenvoice took $67.2 million from 180,000 people, the top-grossing festival in the world that year, and in 2015 it sold 198,000 tickets for $84.2 million, both records for a festival. In 2016 the city raised the attendance cap from 99,000 to 125,000, and Guns N' Roses headlined with Axl Rose, Slash and Duff McKagan back together for the first time in years. By 2017 the festival was drawing 250,000 people and grossed $114.6 million, the first time a recurring festival had passed $100 million.
Every headliner
- Beck, Tool, Rage Against the Machine.
- Jane's Addiction (one day). No festival in 2000.
- Björk, Oasis.
- Red Hot Chili Peppers, Beastie Boys.
- Radiohead, The Cure. The first sellout.
- Coldplay, Nine Inch Nails.
- Depeche Mode, Tool.
- Red Hot Chili Peppers, Rage Against the Machine, Björk. The first three-day festival.
- Prince, Roger Waters, Jack Johnson.
- Paul McCartney, The Killers, The Cure.
- Jay-Z, Muse, Gorillaz.
- Kings of Leon, Arcade Fire, Kanye West, The Strokes.
- The Black Keys, Radiohead, Dr. Dre & Snoop Dogg. The first two-weekend festival.
- Blur, The Stone Roses, Phoenix, Red Hot Chili Peppers.
- Outkast, Muse, Arcade Fire.
- AC/DC, Jack White, Drake.
- LCD Soundsystem, Guns N' Roses, Calvin Harris.
- Radiohead, Lady Gaga, Kendrick Lamar. Beyoncé had been announced but withdrew because she was pregnant.
- The Weeknd, Beyoncé, Eminem.
- Childish Gambino, Tame Impala, Ariana Grande.
- Cancelled because of the pandemic. Rage Against the Machine, Travis Scott and Frank Ocean had been booked for 2020.
- Harry Styles, Billie Eilish, Swedish House Mafia with The Weeknd. Kanye West withdrew two weeks before.
- Bad Bunny, Blackpink, Frank Ocean (weekend one), Blink-182 (weekend two).
- Lana Del Rey, Tyler, the Creator, Doja Cat, plus a No Doubt reunion.
- Lady Gaga, Green Day, Post Malone, Travis Scott.
- Sabrina Carpenter, Justin Bieber, Karol G, Anyma.
The repeat headliners
Two acts have headlined three times: Red Hot Chili Peppers (2003, 2007, 2013) and Radiohead (2004, 2012, 2017). Rage Against the Machine (1999, 2007), Tool (1999, 2006), Björk (2002, 2007), The Cure (2004, 2009), Muse (2010, 2014), Arcade Fire (2011, 2014) and Lady Gaga (2017, 2025) have each done it twice. Gaga is only the second woman to headline twice, after Björk.
Firsts
Recent editions have brought a run of firsts. In 2018 Beyoncé, a year late after pulling out of 2017 while pregnant, became the first African-American woman to headline; her set, with a full marching band, drew 458,000 simultaneous viewers on YouTube, the festival's most-watched performance. In 2019 Ariana Grande, at 25, became the youngest headliner and only the fourth woman to headline. In 2023 Bad Bunny and Blackpink became the first Latin and first Asian headliners. In 2025 the Los Angeles Philharmonic became the first major orchestra to play, and in 2026 Karol G became the first Latina headliner.
The nights that went wrong
In 2008 Roger Waters' inflatable pig flew away during his set. In 2009 Paul McCartney ran 54 minutes over the festival's strict curfew, and two nights later The Cure had their power cut after going 30 minutes over. In 2012 a projection of Tupac Shakur, made with a version of the old Pepper's ghost stage trick, joined Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg on stage. In 2019 Justin Timberlake had reportedly been due to headline but cancelled after bruising his vocal cords, and plans for Kanye West to headline fell through when the festival couldn't build the giant dome he wanted; he held his first public Sunday Service on the campgrounds on Easter Sunday instead. And in 2023 Frank Ocean's set was scaled back at the last minute after he was injured: a planned ice rink with more than 100 skaters had to be melted, he started an hour late, stopped after running 25 minutes past curfew, and pulled out of weekend two. Reports put Goldenvoice's losses on the rink alone at more than $4 million.
The site
The festival sits on the 78-acre Empire Polo Club, about 125 miles east of Los Angeles; with parking and camping it covers around 642 acres. Headliners play the Coachella Stage, the main outdoor stage, next to a smaller one called the Outdoor Theatre. Most of the other stages are tents named after deserts: the Mojave and the Gobi for acts of every genre, and the Sahara, a huge hangar-like tent for the biggest dance acts, enlarged in 2018. Smaller rooms have come and gone, including Yuma for up-and-coming DJs and Sonora for punk and Latin acts. Desert weather can swing a long way: in April 2012 the temperature went from 43°F on the first weekend to 106°F on the second.
Coachella today
The weekend-one sell-out isn't automatic any more: in 2024 it took nearly a month, when it normally takes less than a week. But the deal Goldenvoice signed with the city of Indio in 2013 keeps the festival there through 2030, and Goldenvoice runs a second festival on the same site, the country festival Stagecoach, the weekend after.
For Britain's biggest festivals and their headliners, see Glastonbury, Download and Reading and Leeds, and for Poland's biggest, Open'er. Going to a festival for the first time? Start with our guide to your first festival. And for one of Coachella's three-time headliners, read why Radiohead stopped playing “Creep”.
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- History, headliners, attendance, grosses and firsts: Wikipedia, “Coachella”, read 23 Oct 2026 (its prose and its festival-summary table)
