2017 festival attended by 250,000 people grossed $114.6 million, marking first time a recurring festival grossed over $100 million.
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Gps Coordinates / 33.682494,-116.237617
Coachella 2017 USA VR Festival
2017 Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival
Between the two weekends of Coachella, scenes for the film A Star Is Born, starring Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper, were filmed on the festival grounds.
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One way to think about Coachella. It’s a festival whose humble beginnings date back to when Pearl Jam was warring with Ticketmaster and booked itself into the Empire Polo Club in 1993, as lighting-oneself-afire an act of anti-careerist stubbornness as has existed in the music industry’s recent history.
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What is Coachella 2017? If you read the news, you’ll find a lot of people trying to define the festival when they clearly don’t know much about it.
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Without doubt the spotlight act of the day was Radiohead - the band played before a sea of humanity and opened with slower, more contemplative material from A Moon Shaped Pool before suffering through three different sound stoppages, leaving the main stage twice before returning in a much feistier mood, with Thom Yorke changing the band’s setlist seemingly on the spot to troll festival organizers with the much-maligned “Creep,” blaming the various failures on “aliens.”
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It won’t get easier for Coachella. The 2017 festival is increasing capacity; its cousin event, Desert Trip, was a paradigm shifter last year; and another LA festival, Arroyo Seco Weekend (basically Coachella for Generation X), will launch in June. Goldenvoice entertainment venues keep winning.
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2017 festival expanded in size by 20 acres and jumped in capacity from 99,000 to 125,000, according to the LA Times. That’s more than three times the size since 2001
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Over 20,000 more festival goers were admitted for each weekend. Also, two new, desert-themed tents were added
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Coachella thesedays now takes place over two consecutive weekends, Coachella’s first year came after the rape and riots reported at Woodstock’s 1999 reunion.
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Variety.com reported that the first day was only at half capacity and the second day sold out, but overall the festival drew attendees from 40 different states.
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The second festival didn’t follow until 2001, giving promoter Goldenvoice the chance to bounce back from losing money in 1999.
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Coachella also now even has its own palette of medical ailments to contend with in the dry desert heat. “Oh, you have Coachella lung,” said a friend when he heard me cough up the dust and grass vapor. He referred me to a recent article LA Weekly had published offering advice from a doctor who travels out to the area each year to provide intravenous rehydration services to people who party a bit too much during the festival.
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As for Australia’s Avalanches making their first U.S. appearance in 15 years on the back of their 2016 global comeback smasheroo Wildflower -the show proved that their real strength is as a studio creation vs. live act, with a catastrophic rig failure in the middle of “Subways” making for an interesting moment of improv for a band that isn’t really built for that sort of thing.
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One of the most anticipated performers of the weekend, legendary composer Hans Zimmer brought “a cello concerto to the desert,” and then some.
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With over 30 people on stage, including a full orchestra and choir, Zimmer led the Outdoor audience through intricate arrangements of scores from movies like “The Lion King,” “Pirates of the Caribbean” and “Inception.” Not everyone in the festival crowd was ready for Cellochella.
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An indoor dome introduced in 2017 to screen 360-degree immersive videos. The structure is 120 feet in diameter, features 11,000 square feet in projection space and air conditioning, and can seat 500 people. Obscura Digital produced the film shown in 2017.
An air-conditioned dome for a planetarium show tricked out with innovative computer graphics tech and tripped out with breathtakingly morphing psychedelic imagery.
It launched viewers up out of the desert Space Mountain-style, into intricately dreamlike landscapes with floating shapes, both organic and geometric, until eventually blurring the lines between the two past the point of differentiation.
