With Coachella weekend fresh in our collective memory (search Bieberchella in any search bar), I’ve been thinking about the future of music festivals, EDM, authenticity, and how we relate to concerts, live events, artists, and each other.
Music festivals aren’t dying, but the experience has definitely changed. Shows are more expensive, more performative, and more mediated by technology, while the genuine, present-moment connection they once had has slowly slipped away.
The Cost of Festivals
I saw many a think-piece on the high cost of festivals, in the form of short form Reels, longer YouTube videos, news and blog articles. It’s estimated that Coachella generated more than $200 million in revenue, a stark contrast to the original founders’ intent to create an affordable festival experience more than 30 years ago, in the face of commercialized, mainstream concert venues dominated by money-hungry Ticketmaster.
Still, hordes and masses attend these festivals. They book flights, hotels, VIP wristbands, and put everything on credit.
The demand hasn’t disappeared, even though the cost has skyrocketed. If anything, the higher price point seems to have intensified the spectacle.
The Appeal of Escapism
It’s no surprise that people today want to escape their daily lives. The economy is in shambles, the future is uncertain, and a general sense of detached dread looms above our heads like a stormy data storage cloud. 2026 has been unpleasant at times, yet still, we charge forward. Human beings, in general, tend to remain positive, hopeful, always optimistic that tomorrow will be better, different.
It’s in our nature.
Many festival goers attend these events to leave the stressful monotony of their daily lives behind; work, kids, and Microsoft Teams. Everything except “those damn phones,” ever-present in a sea of luminescent vertical rectangles enslaving us all like some Orwellian horror novel come to life several hundred years too soon.
The same devices that connect us to the event also distance us from it, creating a strange loop where we attend in order to document, and document in place of actually attending. Nothing is promised to us, yet we meet up anyways; in massive crowds to quell the constant drone of fear and loneliness we’ve learned to live with, even at night, as we scroll mindlessly, aimlessly, while the screens lull us to sleep.
So, where do we go from here?
As anyone can tell, the industry is kind of buckling in on itself.
There are more festivals than ever, but not all of them can keep up with the rising costs, over saturation, and what people expect them to give. Some of them are simply destined to fall off. Others are going to lean all the way in to the times and get bigger, louder, and more over-the-top, just to stay relevant.
The foreseeable future of music festivals seems split…
On one hand, you have these massive, high-production spectacles custom-built for mass scale and popularity. On the other hand, smaller, more intimate events are trying to hold onto some version of intimacy, or at least the feeling of actually being there.
At the end of the day, the experience is yours to define.