Probably wise not to do this right now.
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Variety reports that this year’s Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, scheduled for the weekends of April 10–12 and April 17–19, is being postponed because of the novel coronavirus. Goldenvoice, the company that produces the festival, has not yet officially confirmed the news or made a statement, but promoters are reportedly scrambling to notify artists and see how much of the festival’s lineup can make new dates in the fall, starting with the weekend of Oct. 9. The Stagecoach Festival, a country music festival held at the same venue the weekend after Coachella, is also said to be moving to the fall.
The news is part of a flurry of disruptions as the novel coronavirus continues to spread in the United States. South by Southwest, the Austin, Texas-based tech, film, and music festival that was set to kick off on Friday, March 13, was canceled last week; Seattle’s Emerald City Comic-Con has been postponed; Miami’s Ultra Music Festival has been canceled; and Pearl Jam has postponed the first leg of an upcoming tour. Outside of the music world, conferences are being canceled left and right, universities, including Columbia, NYU, and the University of Florida, are moving to online instruction, and Boston has canceled its St. Patrick’s Day parade.
Coachella has grown to be one of the biggest music and cultural events of the year since its debut in 1999, and its sheer scale will make rescheduling an enormous logistical challenge. Since 2012, the festival has been held on two consecutive weekends with the same lineup repeated each weekend. So rescheduling isn’t just a question of finding a date headliners Rage Against the Machine, Travis Scott, and Frank Ocean can agree on: to recreate Coachella in the fall, you’d need a Friday Rage Against the Machine was available, followed by a Saturday Travis Scott was available, followed by a Sunday Frank Ocean was available, followed by a Friday Rage Against the Machine was available, followed by a Saturday Travis Scott was available, followed by a Sunday Frank Ocean was available. And that’s just the headliners: There are more than 175 acts scheduled for this year’s Coachella, and the second-tier is full of people like Lana Del Rey, who’d be headliners at any other festival, and might be difficult to book for two consecutive weekends on short notice.
But it’s not just music stars and concert promoters who might be inconvenienced by a Coachella schedule change: As many as 250,000 people attend the festival every year. Passes started at $429 and cover admission to all three days of the show, so a lineup shuffle that moved an act from Saturday to Sunday might not be as disruptive to festivalgoers as it might have been in the days of single-day tickets. On the other hand, Coachella’s current refund policy is that all sales are final, which seems like it will be difficult to defend even in the unlikely event that the festival successfully recreates its entire lineup in October. In other words, whatever the plan is, there are a lot of details to figure out before a public announcement will cause anything but chaos.
Variety suggests that the reason Goldenvoice has set itself the logistical challenge of rescheduling a gigantic music festival instead of simply cancelling might be their insurance policy. Authorities announced three new confirmed cases of the novel coronavirus in the Coachella Valley just today, including one case of community transmission, but neither Riverside County nor the City of Indio have shut down the festival or banned public gatherings. If the festival’s cancellation insurance does not cover communicable diseases, rescheduling before the county takes action could be a way to avoid being caught holding the bag. Whatever contractual requirement the promoters are trying to meet, however, it doesn’t require them to stop roasting Tesla founder Elon Musk on Twitter. When Musk suggested Coachella should be postponed “until it stops sucking,” the festival replied “lol,” and attached a photograph of Jaden Smith flying around the Coachella stage last year atop a Tesla Model X, which right now is the closest they’ve come to commenting publicly:
Whatever happens with Coachella, the novel coronavirus, and the music industry, it’s reassuring to know that American culture—the part of it that’s about blowing raspberries at the rich, anyway—is stronger than ever.
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