A General View Of 2017 Coachella Valley Music And Arts Festival

A billboard advertising Lady Gaga at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in 2017 (Kevin Winter/Getty Images)

CULTURAL DESERT

Coachella 2025 kicks off with scorching weather and cooling demand

Two decades of bumper lineups and boho energy later, does America’s most profitable festival need a vibe check?

4/11/25 8:57AM

In case you missed an onset of sun-baked valleys, brand-sponsored stages, bandana-wearing influencers, and cryptic artist billboards cropping up on your Instagram feeds, Coachella 2025 starts today.

This year, headliners Lady Gaga, Post Malone, Green Day, and Travis Scott will take to the main stage over two April weekends in the desert, where the weather is expected to reach triple digits. For those who don’t want to brave the 100-degree heat, performances will be available to watch on the new Coachella Livestream app, made in partnership with YouTube — as well on the video platform itself, which has been the exclusive streamer of the festival since 2011.

However, those looking to hit the Valley itself this month to catch their favourite artists still can. As it stands, the festival is not yet sold out, in stark contrast to the ’00s and ’10s, when wristbands would be snapped up in a matter of days or even minutes. This follows 2024, when ticket sales were the slowest they’d been in 10 years, and weekend passes went for below face value on resale sites.

Dust settles

So, after a few golden decades of flower crowns and face glitter, are the Coachella vibes, typically the festival’s most valuable currency, finally fading?

Peak music festival coachella — Sherwood News

Search queries for “coachella” first spiked in 2012 — when the event was held over two weekends, Instagram was just starting to blow up, and a surprise Tupac hologram joined Snoop Dogg onstage — before peaking in 2018, the year that the historic “Beychella” performance took place. Since then, though, online interest has slumped, with postpandemic years progressively declining in search volume.

While some have pointed to Coachella’s over-corporatization as a reason for the slowdown, a similar trend can be seen across several other popular US festivals, like Bonnaroo, Lollapalooza, and South by Southwest. Dual peaks are seen annually for most festivals, when tickets are released and then again when it takes place, but most just aren’t building the same hype in recent years that they did in decades prior.

Break camp

One notable exception is Burning Man, which saw online interest peak in 2023 after flash flooding left techno-heads stranded — but attendance figures from the festival have also waned. Perhaps in the postpandemic world, a few disastrous festivals and some healthy livestreams are enough to convince people to just tune in from the comfort of their homes... That said, Live Nation just had its best year for attendance ever, and Fyre Fest 2 is inexplicably on the cards.

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The BBC has become the world’s top news website... by collapsing a little less than its competition

Press Gazette just published its annual look at the biggest news sites in the world across all languages; for the most part, it doesn’t make for particularly pretty reading.

The journalism industry publication’s latest update, which is based on estimates provided by Similarweb for May, found that 37 of the world’s 50 most visited news sites saw their reach shrink. Press Gazette highlighted that American outlets have been hit particularly hard by declining Google traffic compared to European counterparts, owing to the platform’s AI features rolling out earlier in the US.

Even the BBC, having climbed the rankings from last year to top the 2026 chart — reportedly in part thanks to Similarweb’s decision to combine the “.co.uk” and “.com” versions of the URL, given that the sites redirect to each other depending on the user’s location — showed a 1.9% decline from last year.

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Drake whiffs on an expected No. 1 on Spotify

Drake started at the bottom and he’s here, but not quite at the top... of Spotify, at least.

It’s been nearly three weeks since Drake dropped his three surprise albums — “Iceman,” “Habibti,” and “Maid of Honour.” Heading into the month, prediction markets were rating it a near certainty, a 98% chance, that Drake’s sonic onslaught was enough to snag the No. 1 slot on Spotify at least once in June.

But, while he surpassed the late Michael Jackson and took up three slots on the Billboard album chart at once, his newly released songs haven’t quite cracked the popular music-streaming platform’s top charts, and market seem to think the moment has passed.

(Event contracts are offered through Robinhood Derivatives, LLC — probabilities referenced or sourced from KalshiEx LLC or ForecastEx LLC.)

Spotify’s “Top Songs - Global” chart currently show that Jackson’s “Billie Jean,” which is more than four decades old, Justin Bieber’s “Beauty and a Beat,” which climbed back to the top of Spotify charts following his Coachella set in the spring, Olivia Rodrigo’s new angsty love song “The Cure,” and BTS’s “Swim” are all ahead of Drake’s “STFU Janice” from his “Iceman” album.

While Spotify previously reported last month that Drake’s “Make Them Cry” was the most streamed album in a single day this year, that was later revealed to be a data error.

Prediction markets currently show traders are betting there’s only a 15% chance Drake will have a No. 1 song on Spotify in June.

Meanwhile, Taylor Swift is in the lead at 98% — a day before the release of her new original song “I Knew It, I Knew You,” which she wrote and performed for Disney and Pixar’s upcoming “Toy Story 5” — followed by Olivia Rodrigo, whose highly anticipated album “You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love” comes out next Friday.