Coachella is a music festival that takes place in the Coachella Valley of the Colorado Desert. It is known as an aesthetic and highly anticipated event in mainstream culture. However, its idealistic portrayal on social media often strays far from the true experience of Coachella.
Coachella takes place in a desert. Though this may look pretty on Instagram posts, it comes with many downsides. During the day, it becomes extremely hot, which causes a big problem when attendees are forced to walk in the hot sun all day long as they travel between stages, pop-ups and parking lots.
On the other hand, it can become extremely cold during the night as desert weather is very drastic. Attendees feel this whiplash of weather due to the little amount of clothing they must wear in order to stay cool during the stifling heat of the day.
The large temperature change between the day and night is not the only issue that comes with hosting a big event in a desert. The large amounts of dust in the desert frequently cause dust storms. Festival goers are warned to bring bandanas to shield their face from the dust.
Coachella promises entertaining performances from multiple popular artists. However, they release the artist schedule one day ahead of the actual festival, and there are a lot of artists in the lineup. There is bound to be an overlap between the artists that people want to see.
When the general admissions tickets are priced at $549, attendees want to see all of their favorite artists. They will not be able to do so if there is an overlap of their favorite artists. If they knew this prior to buying their tickets, they would be able to decide whether or not they believe it is worth it to spend that much money and not see all of one’s favorite artists. However, the late release of the lineup prevents them from being able to do so.
Junior Kayla Ruge could not agree more with the frustrations expressed by festival goers. “I would hate to pay that much money, and not even see everyone who I want to see,” she said. “I feel like the organizers of Coachella are taking away peoples’ ability to decide if it is worth going when they don’t release the line up early”.
Coachella is marketed to be an event that prioritizes environmental consciousness throughout the entire festival. They encourage people to use the Coachella shuttles rather than drive cars to reduce carbon emissions. Though their intentions to help the environment are good, when the idea is implemented, it becomes extremely expensive. Tickets range from $77 all the way to $223 for shuttle passes.
Multiple attendees of Coachella complained about the lack of organization surrounding the event. Senior Trinity O’Brien voiced her opinion on confusion surrounding the logistics of events. “Most of the time when you are attending an event, you are trying to have fun. You do not need to be stressed over the organization of the event. It is the event organizer’s job to make sure that it is not confusing”. The Coachella website explicitly states not to use google maps to get to Coachella. However, the instructions that they provide are very vague. Many fairgoers also stated that it was difficult to navigate around at the venue as well because there are not many signs.
Coachella is often glamorized on social media, but recently multiple TikToks have surfaced with videos of the audience being completely silent. This goes against the version of Coachella that is posted on other social media platforms, which portrays the crowds really enjoying the music.
Ruge expressed how it is important to remember that social media is very different from real life. “A lot of people go into Coachella with expectations that it is going to be amazing which makes sense because most of them have only seen Coachella as it is shown online. However, they quickly realize that this is not the reality of Coachella”.
Though Coachella is hyped all over TikTok for you pages and Instagram explore pages, there are a lot of negatives that come with this festival. The glamourized reputation of Coachella allows the many cons of this event to slip out of the public eye.
