Is America Past Peak Music Festival?

In case you missed an onset of sun-baked valleys, brand-sponsored stages, bandana-wearing influencers, and cryptic artist billboards cropping up on your Instagram feeds, Coachella 2025 starts today. After a few golden decades of flower crowns and face glitter, are the Coachella vibes, typically the festival’s most valuable currency, finally fading?

Search queries for “coachella” first spiked in 2012 — when the event was held over two weekends, Instagram was just starting to blow up, and a surprise Tupac hologram joined Snoop Dogg onstage — before peaking in 2018, the year that the historic “Beychella” performance took place. Since then, though, online interest has slumped, with postpandemic years progressively declining in search volume.

While some have pointed to Coachella’s over-corporatization as a reason for the slowdown, a similar trend can be seen across several other popular US festivals, like Bonnaroo, Lollapalooza, and South by Southwest. Dual peaks are seen annually for most festivals, when tickets are released and then again when it takes place, but most just aren’t building the same hype in recent years that they did in decades prior.

Perhaps in the postpandemic world, a few disastrous festivals and some healthy livestreams are enough to convince people to just tune in from the comfort of their homes... That said, Live Nation just had its best year for attendance ever, and Fyre Fest 2 is inexplicably on the cards.

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