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The Coachella hype is starting to fade

Ticket sales have underwhelmed for the California music festival

4/15/24 11:52AM

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.

Tom Jones

big deal

6/15/26

Lionsgate persists with decade-long effort to make a “Monopoly” movie

America’s favorite board game is proving a tricky subject for a feature film.

Daily Life in New York City Around The One-year Anniversary of The COVID-19 Shut Down

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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.

Millie Giles

PLAY THE BILLS

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Last night’s Tony Awards were a curtain call for a record-smashing season on Broadway

This year’s star-studded theater awards wrapped up the highest-grossing season Broadway’s ever seen.

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SOUND FAMILIAR?

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Kids these days are listening to more songs from the good old days

Music nostalgia is in full swing, and the younger listeners of today appear to be partying like it’s pre-1999.

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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.