Coachella is celebrating a big milestone this year, so it’s only right to take a look back at where it all started.
The famous desert music festival kicked off its 25th year Friday, April 10 with quite the lineup. This year’s major performers include Sabrina Carpenter, Justin Bieber, and Karol G, among many, many others, and will span two weekends—April 10-13 and April 17-19.
Interestingly enough, the first Coachella was actually held in October and not April. The inaugural festival took place on October 9 and 10, 1999, at the Empire Polo Club in Indio where it still takes place today.But the timing wasn’t coincidental—Coachella’s announcement came just one week after the conclusion of Woodstock ’99, a festival marred by multiple violent issues like looting, arson, violence, and rapes. Organizers wanted to prove a major music festival could be done right.
And the lineup they pulled together for that first weekend looks almost unreal by today’s standards. Saturday featured Beck, the Chemical Brothers, and Morrissey, while Sunday was headlined by Rage Against the Machine and Tool, with Ben Harper and the Innocent Criminals also on the bill. Rage Against the Machine gave the crowd a special surprise toward the middle of their set when they performed “Know Your Enemy” with Tool.Other major acts included Pavement, Moby, A Perfect Circle, Modest Mouse, Spiritualized,plus a strong contingent of electronic acts including Fatboy Slim, Underworld, and Thievery Corporation.
READ MORE: Era-Defining 2000s Rock Band Announces First Album in 6 Years Ahead of Coachella Performance
Tickets were just $50 per day, with around 25,000 people in attendance—a crazy comparison to today’s tickets that start at $529 for a single day, with somewhere around 250,000 attendees.
But the price tag isn’t the only thing that changed. As social media took hold in the late 2000s and early 2010s, Coachella transformed from a music-first desert gathering into a full-blown cultural moment. Instagram turned the festival grounds into a runway, with bohemian-chic fashion becoming as much a talking point as the headliners themselves. Celebrities began showing up in droves, and the festival’s visibility exploded.
Despite the first year’s impressive lineup, the festival wasn’t a financial success. Goldenvoice lost $850,000 on the first Coachella, with headliners agreeing to receive deferred compensation.The festival skipped 2000 entirely, returning in April 2001 as a single-day event before reverting to two days in 2002. In 2007, the festival introduced their three day lineup that it still goes by today.The festival was also cancelled in 2020 and 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
