Music festivals have been an outlet of inspiration and cultural significance across the United States for many decades. One of the most successful festivals of all time is located in Indio, California: Coachella.
Spanning two weeks in April, Coachella has hosted 125,000 daily attendees and 160 artists across seven stages. The 2026 lineup headlined artists like Sabrina Carpenter and Justin Bieber, bringing significant traction to the event.
But the catch to the publicly highly praised festival lies with influencer culture.
Excessive fast fashion waste, influencer marketing and cultural appropriation have long stigmatized Coachella. Notoriously unethical brands like PrettyLittleThing, H&M and others utilize influencers for promotion, driving trends that favor disposable outfits.
Not to mention, the festival has faced backlash over owner Philip Anschutz’s past political donations to anti-LGBTQ+ and conservative organizations. Brands take advantage of the mass consumption and attendees for nothing but plain personal benefit.
“Knowing this information about the owner of Coachella practically ensures that I will never be stepping foot in that festival,” Stanford philosophy junior Gina Welisch said. “Even if my favorite artist of all time was performing, I think it would be unethical and untrue to myself to go to the concert.”
These mass organizations are not the only individuals at fault. Brands hire influencers for Coachella by initiating campaigns six to eight weeks in advance, leveraging creator marketplaces to secure content creators with high engagement.
Influencers have openly sacrificed their own morality to create a platform built on artificial support and deceptive advertising.
Junior Nathaniel Pielak voices his concerns on the matter. “Coachella used to be a counterculture icon but has become mainstreamed to be a symbol of rampant consumerism where influencers propagate false narratives and cause high ticket prices that enable the festival to be the very thing it used to detest.”
These same influencers have turned Coachella’s art-driven theme into an openly capitalist illusion. Brands and influencers are blindsided by the massive amounts of monetary gain and fail to recognize the unethical aspects of attending at all.
“I think people who go to Coachella should be more aware of the things that they are supporting,” said senior Atharva Anthati. “Especially when there are many unethical companies, people must have more awareness in general.”
Coachella’s mainstream success and popularity are hard to ignore, but the underlying ethical inconsistencies fail to give the festival true substance.
