With Kings Of Leon and Kanye West as headliners, I understand that some may choose to read that headline with a different meaning.
However, what I mean to say is that festival passes are very, very close to selling out for the 2011 edition of Coachella. UPDATE: Coachella 2011 is officially sold out.
Whenever tickets do sell out -- be it tonight or the end of this week -- 2011 will easily become the quickest sell out for the 11-year-old festival. This sleepy little music festival situated in the Palm Desert has come a long, long way since its humble beginnings. Coachella has now become, as the kids say, the "Glasto" of the U.S., referencing the popular British outdoor music festival Glastonbury that routinely sells out with ease and sees attendance numbers in the 177,000 range -- 102,000 more than Coachella.
For those that may not know, I have been attending Coachella for five years now. Last year's edition was perhaps my least favorite of all my years -- and that is equally as much my fault as it is the rapidly-growing festival's.
Coachella was ready for a rapid expansion, but I sure as shit wasn't. What was different about 2010 from year's past, however, was that the festival sold-out about a week prior. That means Goldenvoice, the concert promoter, had sold its allotment of 75,000 tickets before the festival even started. 2010's tickets were different, as well, from years past -- no longer would the three days of the festival be divided by day. Concert-goers now received one ticket that would gain them a wrist-band good for admission to all three days. Those fans that wanted to see, perhaps, only Sunday's lineup -- and had done so with ease in the past -- now had to fork over full-price for a three-day festival pass in the hopes of parsing out their experience to a single day. The reasoning behind all this was mainly due to concerns over single-day concertgoers snatching up surrounding hotel rooms for the entire weekend while attending just one day of festival patronage.
