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The Coachella hype is starting to fade

Ticket sales have underwhelmed for the California music festival

4/15/24 10:52AM

The dust settles

Doja Cat brought the first weekend of this year's Coachella to a close last night with a set that was heavy on guest stars (including a crew of dancing yetis), but light on many of her biggest hits, leaving some attendees and viewers at home a little disappointed.

Coachella 2024 — the 23rd installment of the festival, which has been held at the Empire Polo Club in Indio, California almost every year since 1999 — has had a tough time by its own hyped-up high standards. Indeed, the festival has seen the slowest ticket sales in 10 years, leading some to speculate that the Valley party might be past its peak, with preliminary data from Google Trends also revealing a modest decline in the number of searches for the desert event since online interest topped out in 2018.

Along with fellow headliners Lana Del Rey and Tyler, the Creator, Doja Cat represents a shift away from Coachella’s rockier, more independent origins... but it’s not just the acts on the festival's lineups that have started to look a lot different in recent years. Indeed, Coachella critics like to point to “brand houses” and the “I nfluencer Olympics” feel of the modern festival as examples of its over-corporatization and reasons for its waning popularity in recent years.

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The competitive shooter is one of the most popular gaming franchises in the world and has been the US’s bestselling series for the past 16 years. The next title in the 22-year-old franchise, “Black Ops 7,” will debut in November.

Paramount, which closed its merger with Skydance in August, has had a summer of big deals. It acquired UFC broadcast rights in a $7.7 billion deal with TKO last month, following a $1.5 billion deal for “South Park” rights in July. The company also lured “Stranger Things” creators away from Netflix last month for a four-year film and TV development deal.

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“Blinding Lights” just officially hit 5 billion streams on Spotify

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According to Spotify data collated by Kworb, the song now has a staggering 5,000,010,581 streams on the platform, and is racking up nearly 1.5 million streams each day at the time of writing.

Blinding Lights crosses 5 billion chart — Sherwood News

While Ed Sheeran’s “Shape of You,” released about two years before “Blinding Lights,” looks like it’ll be the next song to hit the 5 billion boundary, “Starboy,” another song from The Weeknd, might not be too far behind.

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